Friday, November 20, 2009
By Bernie Monegain, Healthcare IT News
A bill that provides loans of up to $350,000 for physicians and $2 million for medical groups to buy electronic health record systems or other healthcare information technology is likely to benefit solo and small group practices the most, according to investment bank Piper Jaffrey.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved HR 3014, sponsored by Rep. Kathleen A. Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Small Business Regulations and Healthcare Subcommittee. The Small Business Health IT Financing Act would authorize the Small Business Administration to oversee a $10 billion loan program for healthcare providers.
The bill now faces Senate action.
“The smaller provider market is the greatest beneficiary of this, giventhe limits on the loan size,” said Sean Wieland, Piper Jaffrey’s senior research analyst, in a brief. “A five-doc group can get a max loan for $2 million. A 100-doc group can also get a max loan for $2 million. Therefore, we think it will accelerate adoption levels in the five-doc-and-under market.”
“It’s apparent that the government is making the ambulatory sector the enter of their efforts,” Wieland said.
The brief, written by Wieland and research analyst Nohan A. Naidu, also notes that athenahealth is well positioned to benefit from the program.The Watertown, Mass.-based provider of Web-based electronic health record and practice management services for physicians “is best positioned to take share in this segment because of their in-the-cloudapproach to both practice management and clinicals,” Wieland said.
Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions and Quality Systems, Inc,. are also well positioned to gain market share in this sector, Wieland noted.
Share This
Federal agencies hope to use the government’s Connect software to share health information with private healthcare providers, but current information security and privacy laws significantly block their way, government health IT executives said yesterday.
Two key laws – the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – are a particularly steep hurdle to electronic record sharing among federal agencies and private sector providers, they said.
The combined technical requirements of the laws mean organizations must often take more than 200 steps – from doing risk assessments to setting up access controls – to assure their information and systems are safeguarded.
“And that is not a scalable model for the country,” said Vish Sankaran, program director of the Federal Health Architecture office, which is managing the Connect project. He made his remarks at a forum hosted Nov. 5 by market research firm Input Inc.
“A small practitioner’s office would not have the infrastructure to manage all the security controls,” Sankaran added. “And we can’t have the government having to check that all these systems are compliant.”
Under HIPAA, healthcare providers and plans must protect patient information. And under the FISMA, federal agencies must safeguard, monitor and document that their networks and systems are secure.
Federal agencies would like to exchange health information with private providers, Sankaran said. For instance, many veterans and military service members seek treatment from private providers, and their federal health programs want to receive updated information about patient medications and tests. read the rest of the article http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72350
Share This
