Stimulus bill promises a new era in digital health care: but american recovery and reinvestment act gives pharmacies short shrift.

and resources and as a gateway to better health outcomes more broadly, not just as a way to reduce prescription errors. President Obama provided the most recent rationale for EHRs when he linked them to job creation, mostly from sales of e-health software and hardware. The President’s support of EHRs catapulted previously landlocked congressional legislation onto the deck of the fast-moving stimulus bill. Known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the stimulus bill aims to create a new digital health nirvana in which federal dollars would be pumped into physician practices and hospitals (but not pharmacies) so that they can purchase off-the-shelf software systems that will become magically robust and, at long last, interoperable. The ARRA has three general components: