The EHR incentives in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) will cause nearly every healthcare organization to tear up their IT strategy and plans.  The incentives are significant and the time lines are incredibly aggressive for most organizations.  We cannot simply overlay the new work on top of the existing plans.

Healthcare, like corporate America, is focused on belt-tightening.  I have a backlog of really good ideas to reduce the cost of care to our patients.  Our new focus on Electronic Health Records will reduce our ability to implement these ideas.

This is a game changer.  Time to rethink what you can get done and when you can do it.  Even the time to develop a new strategy is limited.  If we spend the rest of 2009 planning and waiting for the definition of meaningful use we have a year to implement an EHR in our medical group and a year to implement the hospital EHR.  Talk about all hands on deck.

Then again, I think that was the purpose of the legislation.  Get healthcare organizations to make EHRs a top priority to get them implemented once-and-for-all.

Is your organization looking at the ARRA this way?