Transcript - ARRA: In Their Own Words

Karen Sheehan, CIO, Swedish Covenant Hospital (Chicago, IL)

At Swedish Covenant we feel like we're in a good position for ARRA. We've implemented CPOE, our physicians are using our clinical systems with our med reconciliation and medication administration. We really feel like we're in the right place. We have work to do and it'll be a busy year getting the final things completed but I think that we're going to be ready.

Chris Baldwin, CIO, Southcoast Hospitals Group (New Bedford, MA)

Well, with regard to "meaningful use," I believe the most important element is really to come up with a definition fairly soon. I'm very encouraged by the fact that the government "incenting" physicians and hospitals to implement HIT but the dilemma that we have 'How do we set our priorities? How do we meet those deadlines if we're not at a point where we really know exactly what the standards are, what the specific issues are that we have to address, what the "meaningful use" criteria are?' So first and foremost, it's setting the criteria early enough so that we can target those objectives.

David Briden, CIO/VP, Exeter Hospital (Exeter, NH)

Well, I think this is an opportunity for health care to try to get it right and try to really make a difference with technology. So the industry is going to follow the standards that are set by the government and set them right. Set them hard. Make it a challenge to meet it. Don't make the bar set so low so that everybody can meet the challenge. Make it difficult. Make organizations stretch. This is the one opportunity that organizations are going to have to get it right and that the country is going to have to get it right. 

Dennis Fonseca, VP/CIO, Jordan Hospital (Plymouth, MA)

Well I think there are probably three things I'd want them to be aware of. One is hospitals are facing an awful lot of regulations and legal types of things that they have to attend to. So our world isn't just meeting the stimulus, it's also taking care of all these things like HIPAA and other regs. So that's one thing, keep that in mind as you're defining what "meaningful use" is.

Probably the second thing is you're setting a benchmark here and in a sense you can end up penalizing the smaller community hospitals that really haven't had the funding to bring them up to a certain level to be as compliant as some of the well-funded hospitals. And so where we'd all like to be starting from an equal playing field, some of the smaller hospitals are already starting from a lower level of funding and it's going to take them more to get to the point to be compliant and therefore they're not going to get the funding as quickly and they're the ones that need it the most and so that would be the second thing.

And then thirdly is what's the original intent of the stimulus? I mean the original intent is to try to stimulate the economy now and part of the problem that we have with this bill is that it's going to stimulate the economy over four or five years, whatever the case may be, at which point it sort of loses the impact that the original intent was: to help our hospitals and our economy.