Advocacy & Policy

advocacy As our local, state and national governments move forward with sweeping changes to the healthcare industry, it is paramount that our community’s best interests are included in the conversation and reflected in the legislation.

LISTA National Latino Alliance on Health Information Technology will work to effect positive public policy by:

• Identifying and tracking healthcare policies relevant to the Latino community
• Representing the interests of diverse Latino constituencies in meetings with key policymakers
• Updating our fellow Latinos on developments that may affect them and encouraging them to
make their voices heard

DON’T PENALIZE SPANISH-SPEAKING DOCTORS! ALLOW MORE TIME BEFORE PENALTIES KICK IN

As you may know, physicians who convert to meaningful use of electronic health records will be eligible for incentive funding starting in 2011; however, those who lag behind in implementing HIT will start to pay penalties in 2015. This will mean cuts to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements—and Latino doctors serve a disproportionately higher number of these patients.

Health records which are written in Spanish will require more time to be converted electronically, since the current OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology serves mostly English language users.

Join our growing network of online activists to urge Congress to allow more time for Spanish-speaking physicians to convert to electronic health records.

“LatinoHIT is creating a specialized Advocacy and Policy Committee made up of Latino community leaders and visionaries with the power to influence policymakers at all levels of government. To see a list of committee members,click here.”

LISTAHIT.ORG

The National Latino Alliance on Health Information Technology

Advocacy & Policy