[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]
“With the passage of ARRA (the American Recovery And
Reinvestment Act of 2009, also called the federal stimulus
package), some $19 billion dollars have been earmarked for Medicare
and Medicaid technology incentives over the next five years. This
program is known as HITECH (PDF), short for Health Information
Technology for Economic and Clinical Health.“The program will use carrots, in the form of several million
dollars per hospital and up to $44,000 for individual doctors, and
sticks, in the form of Medicare reimbursement cuts, to get
hospitals and doctors to move to EHRs (electronic health records),
also called EMRs (electronic medical records).”