HIT Opportunities for States

AAHSA and its Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) worked to ensure that long-term care services and aging services and support were included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.  One of the victories for long-term care and aging services providers was the inclusion of Health Information Technology (HIT) provisions which include:

• Definition of health care providers included skilled nursing facility, nursing facility, home health entity and an open ended category of “other long term care facility;”
• Definition of Health Information Technologies (HIT) includes hardware and software used in the creation of health information, which could potentially encompass telehealth and biometric telemonitoring;
• A study on aging services technology proposed by CAST and included in one of the two House IT bills introduced last Congress.  This study by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will examine “matters relating to the potential use of new aging services technology to assist seniors, individuals with disabilities and their caregivers throughout the aging process;”
• A study to determine if long-term care providers, long-term care hospitals and rehabilitation hospitals, who will currently not receive incentive payments to encourage the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) technology prior to 2014, should receive such payments;
• Funding for states in the form of grants and loans to encourage use of HIT; the loans are specifically directed at health care providers that are not covered by the incentive payments, so LTC providers would be eligible for loans; specific requirements for both the grants and the loans are to be developed by the states; there are specific requirements for both loans and grants; there are extensive requirements to involve providers as state plans are developed and implemented. CAST will be following up on available loan and grant programs and will help AAHSA state executives bring technologies to long-term providers.
• Not-for-Profit organizations (or consortiums) that meet the eligibility criteria can apply to become regional centers to facilitate HIT in rural and other underserved areas.

An extended summary of the provisions related to providers may be found on the CAST Website.  The Office of National Coordinator for HIT at the Department of Health and Human Services and states throughout the country are working swiftly on plans to implement the $2 billion for HIT programs (in addition to the roughly $18 billion in acute care Medicare/Medicaid HIT incentive payments).  

Requests for proposals for the grants and loans have not come out yet but are expected to come out later this summer.  CAST and AAHSA are working on the national level to ensure that the long-term care sector is not inadvertently left out of the investments that will be made in the national HIT infrastructure.