Funds are meant to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records among health centers serving low-income and individuals.

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced grants totaling $83.9 million to help networks of health centers accelerate the adoption of electronic health records and other health information technology.

The funds are part of the $2 billion that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 earmarked to HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to expand healthcare services to low-income and uninsured individuals through its health center program.

Statistics show that low-income and uninsured Americans have often received an inferior quality of healthcare when compared with middle and upper income Americans who have health insurance coverage.

Earlier this month, the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced it had awarded $220 million to 15 Beacon Communities across the nation to demonstrate a future where hospitals, clinicians and patients use health IT in different ways to strengthen healthcare delivery within their communities and achieve measurable improvements in healthcare quality, safety and efficiency.

Yesterday, ONC announced a new round of two additional Beacon awards totaling $30.3 million. The agency lists eligible applicants as state governments; county governments; city or township governments; special district governments; higher-learning institutions; Native American tribal organizations and governments; and nonprofits.

Successful applicants must be able to show existing, advanced health IT infrastructure, or be able to demonstrate previous success and/or advanced core-competencies in community-level practice redesign and care coordination or community-level evaluation, performance monitoring and feedback.

To qualify as a Beacon Community, communities will be expected to have higher rates of EHR adoption than published national estimates. They will be required to specify their plans to enhance their current capabilities within their established area of excellence and their plans to build their capabilities in the remaining two areas through health IT.

Successful applicants will be held accountable for high levels of EHR adoption and achievement of meaningful use among a majority of providers, and information exchange across providers and organizations for quality improvement and care-coordination purposes.

Written by Camille Tuutti

With the passage of health care reform legislation last month, attention has now turned from arguing its merits to understanding its practical implications. In the world of health information technology, or health IT, the electronic health record (EHR) is one focus of this attention, but applications that build on their widespread adoption are where the real transformation in health care will take place.

In 2009, there were more than 1 billion visits to physicians’ offices, outpatient hospitals and emergency rooms. Each visit represents a shoebox of clinical data that’s sitting dormant, untapped, and utterly disconnected from any other clinical data that person may have generated.

There are data in stacks of paper files in doctors’ offices and taking up entire floors of hospitals across the country, data in files submitted in medical claims, data in pharmacy claims, in lab records and so on. As clinical data are created, they remain in various forms, stored in isolated silos. The sum total of these data comprises a staggering amount of untapped actionable health intelligence.

But all that is changing. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provides $36 billion in incentives for physicians, hospitals and other health care providers to implement a digitized form of medical records. In digitized form, such data can be combined with data from prior visits and used to create a truer, more comprehensive picture of an individual patient. It also can be analyzed in thousands of ways to improve the quality of health care and lower costs.