Stimulus boosts Bay area electronic health records plan

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Funding included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for electronic health records is expected to lead to 132 new jobs in the Tampa Bay area.

The new jobs will be for people who would work alongside physicians as trainers and support staff. They will help doctors convert from writing paper prescriptions to using electronic prescribing, according to a release from PaperFree Tampa Bay, a new public/private partnership.

The effort is a first step toward implementing connected electronic health records to improve patient safety and cut costs, the release said.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the $787 billion stimulus approved by Congress and signed by President Obama. It includes $2 billion in grants and loans to build IT infrastructure.

USF Health and Allscripts will fund the initial phase of PaperFree Tampa Bay’s program, which will target 3,200 physicians in Hillsborough County, the release said. Once stimulus dollars become available, the program will be expanded to a 10-county region, allowing additional hiring to occur, the release said. Those counties include DeSoto, Hardee, Hernando, Highlands, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Sarasota.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Tampa) said the community would get high-wage health industry jobs, while also investing in the future of science and technology.

Federal law allows the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pay physicians between $44,000 and $64,000 over five years, beginning in 2011, to deploy and use electronic health records to care for patients. In addition, federal law provides about $3,500 in annual financial incentives for doctors who e-prescribe now, and will impose penalties on those who do not e-prescribe by 2012, the release said.

Less than 10 percent of physicians in the U.S. currently write prescriptions electronically, the release said.

The initiative will provide to doctors free software from Allscripts- Misys Healthcare Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MDRX), a Chicago-based software firm. It will draw on research on how physicians respond to change conducted by USF Health, which includes the University of South Florida's colleges of medicine, nursing and public health; the schools of biomedical sciences as well as physical therapy and rehabilitation sciences; and the USF Physicians Group. USF Health.

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