IT foundation urges Congress to invest in healthcare to create jobs

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has called on Congress to invest $30 billion on broadband, the smart electronic grid and healthcare information technology as a way to create as many as 949,000 jobs.

ITIF president Robert Atkinson on Wednesday presented the report, "The Digital Road to Recovery: A Stimulus Plan to Create Jobs, Boost Productivity and Revitalize America," at the National Press Club. The report comes as administration and Congressional leaders assemble a stimulus package that is expected to include tax cuts and total more than $700 billion.

"Investing in our nation's digital infrastructure delivers more jobs and makes America more competitive than spurring consumer spending or even investing in traditional physical infrastructure," Atkinson said. "We need a forward-looking stimulus package that supports the future economy and transformative technology-like broadband networks, health IT and the smart grid."

An additional $10 billion investment in health IT in one year would create as many as 212,000 new or retained U.S. jobs for a year, according to the report.

Investments in IT infrastructure should not be minimized out of concern that the projects will take too long to begin to have an immediate impact on the economy, the report notes.

"If the stimulus measures are designed properly, they can quickly spur a large number of investments - from deploying more and faster broadband networks to switching to electronic health records to rolling out advanced energy metering technologies (smart meters) - that are shovel ready," the report said.

Spurring the investment of $10 billion in health IT would also lead to better quality care and fewer medical errors for patients and lower costs for healthcare payers (including the federal government), the ITIF said. The network effects would go even further as advances in health IT enable new technologies, like rapid-learning health networks, that would enable researchers to spot dangerous side-effects from drugs or other treatments as well as identify effective treatments more rapidly.

The ITIF report follows a blueprint recently released by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society that calls for $25 billion of government spending to help promote the adoption and use of healthcare IT.