ARRA versus HITECH Rant

I’m sad to say I’m back again with another rant on terminology. You may remember my previous EMR versus EHR rant. Yes, I’m sorry to say that once again we have two terms which in practice mean the same thing.

Take a look at the following 2 terms:
HITECH – Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health
ARRA – American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Since the HITECH Act was passed, everyone I interacted with called the $18 billion in EHR stimulus money the HITECH Act. Now, it seems like most of the people at HIMSS are calling it the ARRA. In the end, they both mean the same thing. Just sad that we still can’t standardize the most trivial of things. I’ll continue to use HITECH act since it sounds better than ARRA (how do you even say that?). Although, I’ll be certain to add in a few ARRA so Google sends me some ARRA traffic as well.

Since I’m ranting for a moment. Turns out I also screwed up CCHIT. No, I didn’t screw up the certification. Someone else did that. I always called it C-C-H-I-T (basically spelled out), but it seems like the more common pronunciation is C-Chit. Luckily I mostly read and write about it as opposed to saying it since I try to avoid 4 letter words with “hit” in them. It’s funny how two people reading the same thing can change how it’s said.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of EHR, EMR, HIT, HIPAA, HIE, RHIO, HL7, CCR, PHR, HITECH, ARRA, CCHIT, ONC, HHS, and of course the women love when we talk about PMS. Not to mention I still have quite a bit to write about HIMSS. Oh brother.