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The HITECH Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, put in place incentives
for doctors and hospitals to help them make the investment in Electronic Health Records,
and it made a very important distinction: it said it's not about the technology, it's
how you use the technology to improve care. And that really has set the framework for
everything that we've done. And it has moved health care in a direction that isn't just
about more technology it's about using that technology in a way that's going to be meaningful
to patients. To give you one example, in Cleveland, as part of a community improvement project,
they looked at the care that patients with diabetes receive, the basic stuff that any
person with diabetes should be getting. They should be getting the pneumonia vaccination,
their blood sugars checked, their eyes examined. How often to people get all of those basic
standards of care met? In a paper-based world it happens about seven percent of the
time. With an Electronic Health Record, care that's delivered gets you the right care
fifty-one percent of the time - that's not enough; we need to do better - but it's seven-fold
more common to get all the right care with an Electronic Health Record. And here's
the most amazing point: the care of those individuals with Electronic Health Records
was improving faster than those still on paper records. Back in 2009, only about one in
every five physicians used even a basic Electronic Health Record system. Within one year of
the passage of HITECH, it went from twenty to thirty percent; the next year forty percent;
next year, I predict boldly, we'll be over fifty percent. So within a very short time
frame, just a span of a few years, we will have gone from Electronic Health Record's
being something that was used in these benchmark institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser
Permanente and Geisinger, to something that is now commonplace in my - and your - primary
care providers.