I’ve been hearing a lot about Obama’s plans to invest in health care as part of his economic recovery plan. Here’s a few snippets of things I’ve read. Once I have a few free minutes, I’ll try to take a few minutes to provide my thoughts on Obama’s plans to invest in health care IT and EHR/EMR software.

First, take a look at an excerpt of Obama’s technology agenda from his website change.gov:

Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems: Use health information technology to lower the cost of health care. Invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.

I originally saw the above listed as “Obama to invest $50 Billion in Electronic Health Records” and it’s interesting to see the same thing quoted just a little bit different at the Health Informatics Blog. $50 billion is a lot of EHR software.

Next, the Washington Post wrote that Obama and Daschle is looking for feedback on the health care system:

“In order for us to reform our health care system, we must first begin reforming how government communicates with the American people,” Obama said in a statement yesterday. “These Health Care Community Discussions are a great way for the American people to have a direct say in our health reform efforts.”

As part of this, you can go and share your thoughts on health care in the US with Obama and his health care team on Change.gov. It will be interesting to see what happens with the information posted to that site. I’m not sure exactly how we’ll know if what we’re saying is heard or not. However, the idea that ti might be heard is great to think about.