"We sorely need more family practice and general medicine physicians in our community here. I think having that incentive, the possibility of repaying some of their loans, will help us with being able to recruit more physicians," says Villanueva.

The road to IT


When President Obama signed the ARRA into law, he dedicated nearly $23 billion to improving health care IT in medical facilities nationwide. The law mandates for hospitals to be paperless and use a fully electronic medical records (EMR) system by 2015.

Based in Spokane, Wash., Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS) is a nonprofit organization that aims to improve health care through innovative technology solutions and partnerships. Among its many services, INHS works with hospitals to meet their IT needs. Michael Smyly, the organization's senior director, says that although he doesn't say it often about the government, it has "done a brilliant job of synthesizing the core" of useful IT practices.

"What they've done is taken the core elements using evidence-based medicine and provided darn good incentives," says Smyly. "The best incentive is that frankly, there are going to be penalties at the end to get people to conform. It's woken everybody up."

The government released specific requirements that hospitals must meet in order to qualify for the incentives at different stages of the progress toward a complete EMR system. Facilities must achieve various levels of meaningful use, which Smyly defines as the "the ability to electronically track patient data that is very meaningful to caregivers. It's really the essence of what people need to do to provide care."

Othello Community Hospital in Othello, Wash., is ahead of the IT game. The 25-bed critical access hospital began working on implementing electronic health records years before health care reform.




"We've been pursuing electronic health records for the better part of six to seven years now, so it's not something that happens overnight," says Harry Geller, the hospital's administrator. "We did it at a time where there weren't any financial incentives for it."

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