The push to increase the use of EHR technology by hospitals and physicians in the United States through the HITECH Act and the Medicare incentive program.

This article reviews key health care spending and electronic health records (EHR) statistics in the United States (Section II); highlights positive and negative aspects of EHR technology (Sections III and IV); briefly reviews the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) (Section V); discusses the rule passed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) and to implement the goals of HITECH (Section VI); discusses the rule passed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to implement the goals of HITECH and focuses on significant requirements of the Medicare incentive program rule as it applies to hospitals and physicians (Section VII); and finally, concludes by highlighting certain issues that have been raised regarding the goals of HITECH (Section VIII).