Sweating the details on health technology policy

The Obama administration's health technology plan includes incentive payments for adopting electronic health records: more than $40,000 per physician and up to several million dollars for hospitals. The payments are based on "meaningful use" of such records, and how the government defines and measures meaningful use will determine whether the $19 billion in incentives is a significant step in reforming American healthcare or a high-tech fiasco, according to this blog posting from the New York Times.