Amid adoption Inroads, Texas Looks To Statewide HIT

When the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) last studied the state’s health IT landscape in 2009, there was fairly broad consensus about the potential benefits of IT, “but provider adoption rates accelerated slowly and many communities lacked the unified visions needed to create and sustain the infrastructure to share records between organizations,” the agency’s Office of eHealth Coordination said in a report on the state of health IT.

Then, later that year, the HITECH Act brought the first of what would eventually be $100 million in funding for health IT investments across the state, in addition to about $500 million in Meaningful Use incentives paid out to eligible providers.

Since then, the agency said, the primary challenge has been collaborating (in the second-largest and second-most populous state) to efficiently use the one-time funding, and figuring out long-term visions for optimal health IT use.