The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology would receive a 7.7 percent funding hike under President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 budget proposal.
ONCHIT, the Health and Human Services Department's health information technology arm, promotes electronic medical record adoption. In a Monday press conference, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt cited EMR technology as a critical component in changing the nation’s health care system and correcting the course of Medicare.
Leavitt described Medicare, on its current trajectory, as “eleven years from going broke.”
The proposed budget would give ONCHIT $66 million compared with its FY 2008 outlay of $61.3 million. ONCHIT’s current budget is flat with FY 2007 funding levels.
The HHS budget document states that the office’s FY 2009 funding will “continue health data standards development, support solutions for privacy and security challenges in electronic health information exchange, and support the testing of standards and services to exchange health information across geographic borders.”
The funding would also back the establishment of a successor to the American Health Information Community (AHIC). AHIC, chartered in 2005 as a federal advisory body, makes recommendations regarding the accelerated adoption of HIT. HHS plans to transition AHIC to a public/private partnership based in the private sector, according to the department.
In addition to the ONCHIT funding, the budget proposes $3.8 million for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to fund the second year of a demonstration project to offer financial incentives for as many as 1,200 physician practices to adopt certified electronic health records systems. The FY 2009 request also covers an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality effort to advance the use of HIT in patient safety.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation would receive $3 million for “independent evaluations of electronic health record adoption and economic factors influencing health IT,” according to the HHS budget proposal. That work would be done in coordination with ONCHIT.
In homeland defense, the budget proposal nearly doubles funding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s biosurveillance initiative, to $101 million from $53 million. But overall, the CDC’s bioterrorism preparedness budget category shrank from $1.479 billion in FY 2008 to $1.419 billion for FY 2009, a 4 percent decline.
Charles Johnson, HHS’ chief financial officer, said the bioterrorism drop is related to the realignment of grants to coincide with state government fiscal year ends and reimbursement periods.
The administration’s budget request also shaves $9 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) FY 2008 budget, to $326 million for FY 2009. But AHRQ's allocation for health IT remains flat.
AHRQ’s job in part is to advocate for and fund projects that involve the adoption of health IT, said Jon White, AHRQ’s health IT director at a Capitol Hill briefing this week.
“But AHRQ’s health IT portfolio remains the same as in FY08,” at $45 million, said Christine Bechtel, vice president for public policy of the eHealth Initiative, a non-profit organization that promotes the implementation of health IT.
AHRQ’s $45 million would support health IT grants to providers under the Ambulatory Patient Safety Program; create a best practices evidence base that address barriers to health IT adoption; fund projects that would demonstrate the value of health IT for health care quality and cost reduction; and support pilot projects for community-based initiatives that publicly report cost and quality information on providers.
Other HHS programs are slated for reduction or elimination, including the Health Professions Grant program and a rural health program, Bechtel noted.
The HHS FY 2009 Budget describes health IT adoption as “a normal cost of business,” she added.
The president’s VA budget also proposes an increase of $2.4 million to fund the Federal Health Information Exchange work, which includes the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange interface between the VA IT system and the Department of Defense’s clinical health
information systems.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
