Bill Would Boost Open-Source EHRs for Rural Use

West Virginia, a small, mostly rural state, is the adopted home of Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, and, arguably, also where open-source healthcare information technology has been most widely adopted.

It is in keeping, then, that Rockefeller, past chairman and current member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and current chairman of the health subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee, announced last week that he was introducing legislation to “facilitate nationwide adoption of electronic health records, particularly among small, rural providers.”

The Rockefeller bill seeks to do so by creating a public utility software system based on the clinical IT systems developed at taxpayer expense by the VA and the Indian Health Service, according to a news release and Rockefeller’s testimony in the Congressional Record.

The senator’s Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 would, according to a news release, “build upon the successful use of open-source electronic health records” by the VA, related software developed by the Indian Health Service and the federal health information exchange software released as open source earlier this month.

Rockefeller’s bill calls for the creation of a Federal Consolidated Health Information Technology Board under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. The board would be responsible for linking efforts of current and new users of the clinical IT systems of the VA and Indian Health Service and ensuring that those systems are updated on a timely basis.