Health IT: the new Apollo program?

Yesterday, Mark Leavitt over at THCB compared the portion of Obama's "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" dealing with electronic health records (EHR) to Kennedy's program to send a man to the moon. Sound far-fetched?

Here's the quote (full article after the jump):

I’m personally struck by the parallels to a historical event still vivid in my memory: Project Apollo, President Kennedy’s incredible national goal of achieving manned spaceflight to the moon.

Apollo cost $22B (in 1969 dollars, now worth five times that) and took 8 years to achieve the first moonwalk. NASA, a new government agency, spearheaded the effort, but the technology was developed by private sector contractors.

The health IT provisions of ARRA invest at least $35B to incentivize full EHR deployment, allowing 5-7 years to reach that goal – remarkably similar to Project Apollo. The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has been codified and funded to lead the effort, and just as in the case of Apollo, I expect much of the work will need to be accomplished by contractors in the private sector -- CCHIT included, of course, provided we quickly “grow up” to meet the enlarged responsibilities.

While EHR won't induce the sort of national high drama that the Apollo program did (I can see eyeballs rolling already...), Mark does have a point about the similar scale and impact of the two projects. Arguably, EHR will actually have far greater impact, through the improved patient outcomes that result from increased accessibility, consistency, and comprehensiveness of our new health records.

Yet until recently, EHR was hardly brought up in the national discourse about high-impact fixes to improve health care. James Holsinger, in all his bespectacled charm, never once mentioned the issue during his prolonged confirmation process for U.S. Surgeon General in '07.

As Mark rightly points out, the thorniest issues surround adoption of new EHR technologies -- getting a physician to give up old patterns of behavior (see NHS's initiative in England to banish white coats) may prove harder than shooting the moon.