By Nancy Ferris, Government Health IT
A majority of the Senate has come to an agreement on a $780 billion economic stimulus bill that preserves most of the $23 billion in health information technology funding approved earlier by Senate committees.
With the support of three Republicans, won over by cutting other sections of the bill, the Senate is expected to approve its version of the stimulus bill Feb. 10, according to news services.
The House and Senate then will begin to reconcile their two bills, which differ in many respects. The House bill calls for about $20 billion in net health IT spending.
Total spending of more than $35 billion would be offset by about $15 billion in savings achieved through the use of health IT, according to an analysis of the House bill by the Congressional Budget Office. Most of the spending would occur in years 2011 through 2024, while the savings would materialize only in 2016 and thereafter.
There appear to be no major controversies between the House and Senate on the health IT provisions. However, there were reports that the Senate bill would eliminate $140 million in IT funding for the Social Security Administration, including funds for retrieving disability applicants’ medical records electronically from hospitals and other records repositories.
Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the three Republicans supporting the Obama administration-backed bill, helped craft the health IT provisions of the Senate bill, according to a press release from her office. "This provision will not only result in $10 billion in savings but also further improvements in care and costs as we implement health care reform, while creating over 40,000 new jobs that will endure," Snowe said.
The bill would provide financial incentives for doctors and hospitals to use e-medical records, establish in law the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, strengthen privacy protections for individuals’ health records, require notifications when data is breached, require Medicare providers receiving subsidies to file clinical quality reports and create programs to support education and training of health IT professionals and health IT research and development.
Congressional leaders still hope to deliver a stimulus bill to President Barack Obama by Feb. 16, but Washington observers speculated that it might be delayed because of the number of issues to be resolved in the House-Senate conference.