The HITECH act has earmarked $19.2 billion for incentives to help encourage healthcare organizations and physicians to start using electronic healthcare records.   What those organizations will actually spend on implementing EHRs is likely to be far greater than $19.2 billion, but it is a good incentive to start them down the road, and it is definitely better than the penalties that will kick in if they haven’t converted by 2015.    The incentives don’t start until 2011, but a lot of organizations have started investigating the work required so that they will be converted by the time incentives start flowing.    This makes now a good opportunity for channel providers to start networking with healthcare organizations and suggesting solutions bundling security products and professional services to them for converting their paper records to EHRs.   Chief among those bundled security products should be ones that offer encryption and data loss prevention since encrypted data is exempt from loss disclosure requirements.    So if you’ve got contacts in the healthcare industry, and want a share of that $19.2 billion pie, now is the time for you to start identifying the security products you think you can help them implement.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under Data Storage Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.