Health Care Trends: Obama Administration Gives Health Care IT a Boost

The US recession isn't going to slow the push for electronic health records. In fact, the current crisis may actually be helping the initiative, which seeks to have an EHR for every person in the country by 2014. Although most of Washington embraces this task, the main question has been how much the government should spend to get electronic records in the hands of physicians. That question has now been answered with the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which allocates $20 billion for health information technology.