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Legislation
aimed at boosting information technology seems likely to
have a place in any Medicare reform bill, say Washington
insiders.
Sen.
Mike Enzi (R-WY), chairman of the Health Education Labor
and Pensions (HELP) committee, introduced the "Healthcare
Information Technology Quality and Improvement Act of 2005,"
with ranking member Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA). The bill
would require health IT systems to work with all other systems,
and authorize a national health IT contractor and a "Best
Practices Center."
The
Enzi-Kennedy bill also would provide grants to help providers
move to health IT systems.
The
Grassley-Baucus pay-for-performance bill also calls for
a three-year, six-site demonstration project on health IT,
aimed at determining the "threshold" amount of
IT that physicians need in order to collect quality data
and use it to improve care for Medicare beneficiaries.
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