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WellPoint Providing Financing for Health IT

The company hopes that favorable interest rates on loans and other financial incentives will ease adoption of technology among rural hospitals and other providers.

WellPoint (Indianapolis) is implementing a new financing program that supports health information technology for rural, critical access hospitals, the company announced.

This program, which will start in California and Georgia in 2011, allows qualifying hospitals to borrow short term funding in pursuit of satisfying the Meaningful Use criteria of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Based on the results of these programs, WellPoint will evaluate the expansion of this program. The goal is to provide smaller providers with the financing to implement IT infrastructure at favorable interest rates.

"WellPoint believes that health IT benefits should be available across health delivery systems nationally, particularly in rural or underserved communities where health inequalities are greatest and adoption of Health IT is often the lowest," Dr. Charles Kennedy, WellPoint's vice president of Health Information Technology and the health insurance industry representative on the Federal HIT Policy Committee, says in a statement. " Our plans are providing sustainable incentives for physicians and hospitals to broadly adopt health IT and ultimately improve health care quality and reduce unsafe and unnecessary care."

UnitedHealth Group also announced an initiative recently to support Meaningful Use requirements, finalized by DHS on July 13. That company's initiative focuses more on technology deployment than financial incentives. WellPoint will also align its Pay for Performance incentives, which pay out about $250 million annually, with federal programs to spur health IT adoption.

"Providing information and clinical decision support at the point of care will promote higher quality, evidence-based care with better patient outcomes," Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's chief medical officer, says in a statement. "The adoption of meaningful use criteria for health IT will create opportunities for new collaborations amongst physicians, hospitals, patients, and health plans to share information for better care coordination, prevention services, management of chronic illness and overall clinical decision making. Although the industry wide conversion to an electronic world is planned to take over five years, WellPoint is already working on opportunities to optimize the emerging infrastructure and data standards."

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio

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