Time to Reboot: Resetting Health Care to Support Tobacco Dependency Treatment Services

Abstract

Within 12 months, the U.S. Congress passed two landmark pieces of legislation that may allow preventive health practitioners to hit the “reset button” on the U.S. healthcare system. The first of these was the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act embedded as Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The second was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, referred to colloquially as the “healthcare reform” bill. Regardless of political opinions over whether the bills do too much or too little, together these legislative mandates have the potential of improving the healthcare milieu for preventive services in meaningful ways: first by changing the administrative architectures for clinical decision-making, and second by altering the reward structures for preventive services.1