With the incentive programs from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now fully up and running, many are looking for signs that the country is getting closer to its goal of a fully networked healthcare system. But former national coordinator for health IT David Blumenthal says that it may still be several years before the nation reaches that finish line.
He said at the recent Massachusetts Healthcare IT Conference that the HITECH Act, which provided the funding for the electronic health records incentives program, was merely a down payment on the creation of a fully networked healthcare system, and that much work still needs to be done, according to Search Health IT.
"We got off to a very promising start when the [HITECH] law was passed, because the law was very clear that the aspiration was about health care change and not the technology," he said, according to the news source. "It won't be about technology, but about the goals that the technology serves."
Still, the launch of the incentives programs has been seen by many as a sign of progress. CMS began processing physician payments last month.