Congress, through its enactment of the "stimulus" bill, is committed to spending $787 billion on various projects, including $20 billion to encourage doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records (EHRs). This new spending is a component of the Obama Administration's health care agenda, which includes the promotion of health information technology (HIT).

An unprecedented effort to computerize the nation's hospitals and physician offices could be the key to reducing crippling health care costs – or a giveaway to technology vendors whose sales will be subsidized by taxpayers.

Today’s health care fails to deliver the most cost-effective care and suffers substantially from medical errors and waste. One often-cited data point is the 1998 Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimate that preventable medical errors lead to as many as 98,000 deaths per year in the United States...

Federal policy makers are debating health information technology (health IT) investments as a part of the economic stimulus and broader health reform efforts.