Spending on EMRs

With the economy being what it is and the necessity to grow economic development throughout all industries of our country, what is the government doing to improve the health care industry? We have all heard of the stimulus package that was debated vigorously and finally passed not too long ago, so what effect will the stimulus and spending in general have on health technology? The Obama administration has set apart $17.4 billion of the stimulus package dedicated for the advancement and use of health technology with Electronic Medical Records as the head liner of the field. Additionally, over the next 5 years an additional $50 billion dollars will be spent on improving health technologies which will ultimately reduce health care costs and improve current practices, methods, and technologies while creating more patient friendly records. President Obama had this to say about it, "We're still using paper. We're still filing things in triplicate. Nurses can't read the prescriptions that doctors have written out. Why wouldn't we want to put that on an electronic medical record that will reduce error rates, reduce our long-term costs of health care and create jobs right now?" Many are uncomfortable that our government would keep spending so much money with how far in debt we are as is, however an investment placed in health care is not one we are likely to regret. For being the leader of all nations when it comes to technology, innovations, and wealth, our health care system is still very mediocre, with an increased emphasis on health technologies, we should see some drastic improvement over the next few years.