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As yet undecided, the incentives may take the form of increased reimbursements, lump-sum payments, in-kind services, or some combination of these.
You can view the entire text of Maryland’s HB 706 here.
As yet undecided, the incentives may take the form of increased reimbursements, lump-sum payments, in-kind services, or some combination of these.
You can view the entire text of Maryland’s HB 706 here.
The Situation – Because of the recession, companies have become more vigilant about their operating expenses. IT budgets in particular are under the microscope, and software maintenance and support expenses are in center view.
It’s unfortunate that it took a global recession to get companies to take a closer look at the expense of their software deployments. Better now than later (or never), but the thought of so much money wasted (under-utilized) is disturbing. No complaints from the software vendors, of course, but after actually analyzing their software expenses, many software buyers are feeling embarassed and even angry.

There comes a point, however, at which tolerance of an industry norm is no longer acceptable. In the case of the software industry, I think we have reached that point, and it has taken the form of abusive, if not unconscionable, pricing for maintenance and support.

What You Can Do – Good news, bad news. The good news is that there are many things you can do–many approaches you can take–to reduce your ongoing software maintenance and support expenses. The bad news is that I can’t list them all here in this single post, at least not with sufficient detail to help you in a meaningful way. So, look for follow-up posts in which I will go through various techniques, one by one, with some real-world experience and examples thrown in. I can help you pop the maintenance and support bubble and start saving some real cash.
Take me to Part Two: Reducing Maintenance Costs – Quick and Dirty Approach
General content.

Not a lot of detail, but some broad-brush objectives stated very clearly.
Go here for more information on the meeting with healthcare industry constituents that preceded President Obama’s speech.
Business is slow for EMR/EHR software providers at a time when business should be booming. With over $20 billion of funding available in the form of reimbursements, we would expect healthcare providers to be waiting in line for their EMR/EHR implementations. Ironically, the very legislation that created this generous funding also included provisions that have given doc’s and hospitals pause. Actually, it’s more than just pause. It’s outright paralysis.
The eligibility for federal dollars is tied to “meaningful use” of “qualified” EHR sytems, which sounds simple enough. But now–nearly four months after passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)–no one knows what meaningful use is, and no one knows what a qualified EHR system is. We have some clues, but we have no official declaration.
If the Obabma adminstration is serious about HIT and EHRs, and it wants to see the economy benefit from this category of HIT spending (a secondary, but nonetheless important, objective of the funding), then the federal government needs to act quickly and decisively to define the eligibility criteria. If this cannot be accomplished quickly, then we’ll lose the economic stimulus feature of the plan–the economy is already starting to improve because of other measures taken and not taken. And if we miss the economic stimulus train, we might as well wait until a more considered approach can be taken with respect to HIT, including EHRs, in the broader scheme of healthcare reform.
What do you think? Is the lack of certainty with respect to EHR system eligibility criteria the main reason the rate of EHR adoption has not increased after passage of ARRA? What can the feds do to expedite development and promulgation of the eligibility criteria?