In a speech pushing his economic stimulus plan on Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama called for all U.S. residents to have electronic health records within five years, Health Data Management reports.
Obama said, "To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its costs, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized." He added, "This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it won't just save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system."
During his presidential campaign, Obama said he would allocate $50 billion over five years to support the adoption of standards-based health IT systems and a national health information network (Goedert, Health Data Management, 1/8).
Obama's economic stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, would require nearly $800 billion in federal funding, Healthcare IT News reports.
Timetable
Obama hopes to begin moving the economic stimulus package through Congress as early as his first week in office (Manos, Healthcare IT News, 1/8).
On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that committee hearings on the package will begin next week, followed by mark ups. Hoyer said that the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee will hold hearings and mark ups on the package in the next few weeks (Epstein, CQ Today, 1/7).
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that she plans to hold a floor vote on the package during the last week of January (Shear/Fletcher, Washington Post, 1/9). In addition, the House will remain in session during the weeklong Presidents Day recess in the event that Congress has not passed the package by that time, Pelosi said (Bourge/Friedman, CongressDaily, 1/8).
Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.) on Thursday said that he expects the committee to begin mark ups on the package during the week after the inauguration (Rogers, The Politico, 1/9).