Federal lawmakers should allocate at least $25 billion to speed adoption of electronic medical records by nongovernmental hospitals, an industry group recommended today.

Completing the transition from paper to electronic records at federal and state-owned health care providers would require additional funds, according to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

The organization unveiled a set of recommendations for the incoming Obama administration and Congress on using information technology to reform health care.

The proposal "represents a minimum of what should be invested," said Stephen Lieber, HIMSS president and chief executive officer, in outlining the plan at a press conference today.

Lieber is among a growing number of policy analysts for whom the goals of health care reform and economic revitalization are intertwined. "We are convinced that moving forward with health IT now will not only be critical to ensuring sustainable positive change for consumers but will also provide an immediate economic stimulus in the way of new jobs across the health care sector," he said.

On hand to support the effort was Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the eight-term congressman from Rhode Island. Kennedy suggested that current political and economic conditions are favorable to overhauling the country's health care system, in part through the large-scale adoption of health IT.

Lauding efforts by the Veterans Affairs Department to improve health care through IT, Kennedy challenged policy-makers to "imagine how much we can do if we bring that to scale."

The congressman said his father, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who is battling cancer, is getting world-class medical care that could be made more widely available with advanced health IT. The time for making that happen is now, he added.

"We can't miss this opportunity," Kennedy said. "It won't come around again for a very long time."

In addition to the call for IT investments, the HIMSS report includes four additional priority recommendations:

• Promote standardization and interoperability, require that health IT products bought with federal IT funds be certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology and comply with interoperability specifications set by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel.
• Expand exemptions to the Stark law and anti-kickback safe harbors as a means of encouraging health care organizations to underwrite physicians' adoption of health IT. Those laws make it illegal to profit from the referral of patients to health care facilities.
• Create a senior-level health IT leader within the administration, authorize a federal advisory and coordinating body, and codify HITSP as the body for national standards harmonization.
• Within 90 days of Obama's taking office, convene a White House summit on reforming health care through the use of IT.