Health Care goes high-tech, this is Industry Focus.

Hi, everyone,

Welcome to Industry Focus Healthcare care edition I'm your host

Christine Hargis and I'm joined today by Motley Fool health care contributor Todd

Campbell and today we're going to talk about health care IT, information technology in the health care sector.

And you know, when I think about big trends going on in health care right now, there are plenty that come to mind,

but one of the really, really huge ones that I think about is IT.

And this is just an absolutely, ginormous thing to watch going on right now because you've

got the government pushing for it.

Back in 2009 as a part of the stimulus bill we had this high-tech act that was passed

and it basically said here's 25 billion dollars with this we want to promote the

expansion and the adoption of health information technology and of course that's a pretty vague term right there, but one of the really big efforts within

Health IT is the establishment of EHRs.

Now EHRs. H.R.s, these are your electronic health record systems where essentially

you've got everything that you need to know about a patient stored electronically.

You've got their patient demographics, their progress notes, drugs, they're taking, problems

they're having, vital signs. I could go on allergies, immunization dates, any sort of

medical history or something that a doctor might want to know in a clinical

setting. The EHR is automate and streamline provider workflow to get all this information together, have

it in one place, have it digital, and be able to work with it that way.

So to me this seems like an absolutely huge initiative.

Todd, where do we stand on it?

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