Health IT developments piggyback on health laws, FCC plan

The health overhaul and other recent laws and proposals will have a broad impact on the health IT world. Here are a couple quick takes:

Computerworld  and Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "If a proposal to allocate radio spectrum for a wireless medical network is approved, many patients may no longer need to travel to a health care facility to be tethered to large machines that monitor their health. Instead, they would be linked to monitoring systems by small, disposable wireless devices, cutting costs and reducing the risk of infection and clinical errors." The proposal comes as part of much larger national broadband plan released in March by the Federal Communications Commission (Mearian, 3/31).

InformationWeek: "Now that healthcare reform is law, IT managers must get ready to deal with an onslaught of new data that will come from the push to provide every citizen with an electronic medical record by 2014 and from the 32 million uninsured Americans who will start new health insurance plans [by 2019]. As the impact of the new law works its way through the healthcare system, Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said he expects to see more data center consolidation, greater challenges around database management and an uptick in desktop virtualization adoption" (Lewis, 3/31).