The bill encourages the private sector to be involved and adopt standard-setting processes. It also establishes grants to help leverage the federal government's investment in health care by targeting financial resources to providers who need help to get online.

In addition to legislative action, the implementation of health care IT moved forward on a regional basis with two November 2005 initiatives to rush electronic health record technology to the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast region.

First, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the establishment of a task force of local and national experts to help providers in storm-ravaged areas turn to electronic records as they rebuild their patients' destroyed medical records.

According to HHS, the task force is charged with helping implement, support, and disseminate state-of-the-art information technology contributing to an infrastructure supportive of interoperable health care data exchange.

The Southern Governors' Association will host the Gulf Coast Health Information Task Force, bringing together local and national resources and coordinating the planning for a digital health information recovery.

In addition to those efforts, the second HHS project assigns the State of Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals with the task of developing a prototype of health information-sharing and electronic health record (EHR) support that can be replicated throughout the region.

Also in November, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced the award of contracts totaling $18.6 million to four groups of health care and health information technology organizations to develop prototypes for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

The contracts are intended to complete the foundation for an interoperable, standards-based network for the secure exchange of health care information. HHS previously awarded contracts to create processes to harmonize health information standards, develop criteria to certify and evaluate health IT products, and develop solutions to address variations in business policies and state laws that affect privacy and security practices that may pose challenges to the secure communication of health information.

Each consortium will be a partnership between technology developers and health care providers in three local health care markets. Each group will develop an information architecture (a plan for a system to accommodate an information network) and a prototype network for secure sharing of information among hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, and physicians in the three participating markets, according to the HHS Web site. Additionally, all four consortia will work together to ensure information can move seamlessly between each of the four networks to be developed, thus establishing a single infrastructure for the sharing of electronic health information.

The four consortia are to be led by Accenture, Computer Science Corporation (CSC), International Business Machines (IBM), and Northrop Grumman.

"These prototypes are the key to information portability for American consumers and are a major step in our national effort to modernize health care delivery," said Brailer when the agreements were announced. "This is a critical piece of moving health IT from hope to reality."