The catchall appropriations bill passed by the House and Senate in late December and signed by President Bush leaves the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology with a budget of $61.3 million for the current fiscal year -- the same amount the office got for fiscal 2007.
Asked about the ramifications of working with a flat budget rather than the much larger one the administration had requested, Dr. Robert Kolodner, national coordinator for health IT, said, “We’re going to be able to continue making progress, just as we’ve been making progress over these last two years at the current budget. It means we won’t be able to accelerate in the ways we had hoped” or start certain new projects.
Bush had requested $117.9 million for the office, which is part of the Health and Human Services Department. The House had voted to keep the office’s funding at $61.3 million, while the Senate had approved $71 million. A congressional compromise at one point in the laborious appropriations process would have given the office about $66.2 million, but the extra money was stripped out after Bush threatened to veto the compromise bill.
Efforts to develop a Nationwide Health Information Network will take the biggest hit, Kolodner said. The office has awarded contracts to nine communities for NHIN trial implementations and planned to add more communities this year, but now that won’t be possible, he added.
The proposed budget also would have allowed ONCHIT to sponsor projects to demonstrate the value of use cases, or health IT application scenarios, which form the backbone of the office’s approach to its mission. Demonstrations -– other than one already under way on secure messaging among doctors -– won’t happen this year, Kolodner said.
A third project that will be postponed involved work on the architecture of personal health records, he added.
He said his staff was still analyzing the impact of the smaller budget. “We’re looking to see what we can do to leverage other activities that are going on or to find alternative ways to achieve the goals that we had in some areas,” he said.
The office is responsible for meeting Bush’s goal of having an electronic health record for every American by 2014. “We think we can still achieve that goal,” Kolodner said, but ONC will need bigger budgets in the years to come.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
