The Stimulus Package and The Win/Win For Americans/Healthcare/IT

The Wall Street Journal reported that early reports are the stimulus package may have the following amounts for Healthcare:

• $39 billion in subsidies to health insurance for the unemployed; providing coverage through Medicaid
• $90 billion to shore up state Medicaid programs
• $20 billion for health-information technology systems
• $4 billion for preventative care

This will be a great opportunity for companies like Sun Microsystems that has a very strong software infrastructure stack and known for our secure and scalable software. The canonical quote is that 40% of Healthcare costs are administrative. The other statistic that is often quoted is that nearly 98,00 Americans die each year due to medical mistakes. President Obama stated on Monday the 9th that healthcare premiums have doubled for the average family in the past eight years.

There is an article at Sun where Bill Vass brings out the following:

"So, here is the background: If the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is the information highway for health data exchange, CONNECT is the universal on-ramp for federal agencies. CONNECT is a software solution that lets federal agencies securely link their existing systems to the NHIN. More than 20 organizations collaborated to build CONNECT through the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), and as a result, agencies are heading down the road toward interoperability.

Using Sun's entire Open Source middleware stack as its foundation, including our SOA and IdM technology, the FHA built the CONNECT gateway software from open-source code. Talk about an Open Source poster child! The solution was jointly developed by federal agencies yet it will be deployed individually at the agency level. The decision to build the solution in open source provided the usual benefits (I know you have heard these from me before):

· Cost reductions for each agency and taxpayer savings

· IT consistency and compatibility across multiple agencies

· Decreased deployment times

· Security"

One of Wayne Gretzky's famous quotes is:

"A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be."

Healthcare is where the IT puck will be going....