HHS awards $1,932,022 for health centers' IT enhancements in Missouri

A New Madrid medical center is one of 29 clinics to receive funding for for health information technology enhancements. The Southeast Missouri Health Network received $65,549. Last Thursday, according to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell announced $1,932,022 in funding for 29 health centers in Missouri. In total, today's announcement includes $87 million in funding for 1,310 health centers in every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Pacific Basin.

"Health centers across the country are instrumental in providing high-quality, comprehensive primary health care to millions of people," said Secretary Burwell. "This investment will help unlock health care data and put it to work, improving health outcomes and building a better health care system for the American people."

The funding will support health information technology enhancements to accelerate health centers' transition to value-based models of care, improve efforts to share and use information to support better decisions, and increase engagement in delivery system transformation. To support these goals, all purchases or upgrades of electronic health record systems made with the funding must use technology that is certified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. This is the first significant investment since 2009 directly awarded to health centers to support the purchase of health information technology.

"These awards will allow health centers to deliver higher quality of care to patients and spend health care dollars in a smarter way," said Jim Macrae, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Acting Administrator.

Nearly 1,400 health centers operating over 9,800 sites provide care to more than 24 million people across this nation, in every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Pacific Basin. Today, health centers employ nearly 190,000 people.

This funding comes from the Affordable Care Act's Community Health Center (CHC) Fund, which was extended with bipartisan support in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015. The increased use of health information technology is part of the administration's efforts to build a health care system that delivers better care, smarter spending and healthier people.