Mr. Vendetti: Unlike proposed health care reform, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as ARRA, already passed in February of 2009. Therefore, the stimulus dollars have already been allocated. There have been a couple of figures thrown about - one is $20 billion, but the real number is $36 billion. The only reason the $20 billion number is sometimes in the press is because if physicians and hospitals don't adopt the information systems, there will eventually be penalties, which could reduce the $36 billion to $20 billion in stimulus dollars over time. But it's already been passed; it's already been allocated. It is, we think, a great opportunity to move our country forward in terms of the convergence of information technology and health care. I think it's the one industry, the last bastion left, that hasn't adopted automation to a large extent anywhere. I believe it's crying out for automation. There are way too many inefficiencies. If we date it back to 1999, the IOM (Institute of Medicine) came out with a report that said up to 100,000 people die every year from avoidable medical errors. So there is a huge opportunity to not only reduce some of the redundant paperwork that's out there, but also to reduce the inefficiencies in the system through automation. By the time they tally up the final 2009 numbers, we spend somewhere around $2.5 trillion, or more than 17% of GDP, on health care. If you look at the waste in the current system, it is estimated to be about 25% of that $2.5 trillion, which is more than $500 billion in waste. That's a huge opportunity to reduce waste. One of the best ways to go about that is through automation. And that doesn't mean what we have right now, which is piecemeal automation. It means a completely paperless environment. The stimulus dollars are a great start. Unfortunately, we were moving very, very slowly towards automation, with some physicians kicking and screaming, but the stimulus will push people forward at an accelerated pace. I don't think we're going to be completely paperless in a couple of years, but that is the ultimate goal, and that's what needs to happen to reduce the waste significantly and improve the efficiencies of our existing health care system.
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