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Please note that I edited this post on April 16, 2009 to reflect our current understanding of the law.
Thanks for your comment. The EMR solution from eClinicalWorks is indeed offered over the Internet, but providers still need laptops and desktops from which to access the Internet, as well as printers, scanners and wireless access points for their practices to support the EMR. It's my understanding that Dell is providing all of this hardware in a turnkey bundle as part of the offering. Dell will also be doing site assessments to confirm power, ISP service and network cables to each system location.
We have noticed some decline, although it is clearly not as marked as in other industries. In a survey we finished in March 2009, we asked a panel of hospital CIOs about how they expected their IT budgets to change over the next 12 months, and 3.8% of respondents expected their overall IT spend to increase by more than 10%, while 42.3% expected a 1-10% increase. This is down a bit, as we asked the same question on a survey in September 2008, and 12.5% of respondents expected their overall IT spend to increase by more than 10%, while 57.5% expected a 1-10% increase.
We'll be publishing the March survey data in two upcoming reports, the first will be HI#217195, Economic Sentiment Among U.S. Healthcare Providers: A Survey of IT Spending Changes, and it should be available within the week. There will also be a 2nd report including the results of the Leading Indicators in Healthcare IT study. I will add links to both reports here once they are published.
That's the overall picture we're seeing -- what are you seeing out there?
The key to the understanding here is the definition of "year". The bill consistently uses "year" to be = "fiscal year", not calendar year. The first of the incentive payments begins to flow in FISCAL 2011. The federal fiscal year begins October 1. Therefore, as we interpret it, the first payments will begin in Q4 (CY) 2010, or Q1 (FY) 2011.
