The Health and Human Services Department announced more than $750 million in grants to state and local governments to facilitate adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems by practitioners and hospitals.

"When electronic health records are designed and used correctly, there's a huge benefit to patients and their doctors,"HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a conference call. "Despite this, only 20 percent of doctors and 10 percent of hospitals have even basic electronic health records.We have some distance to cover."

The HHS grants include $375 million to support development of 32 nonprofit regional extension centers, intended to will help educate health care providers about which records systems best meet their needs and how to use them effectively. HHS' long-term goal is to build a national network supporting 100,000 primary care providers, focusing on those with the fewest resources to adopt technologies on their own, Sebelius said.

Along with the announcement by HHS, the Labor Department announced it would issue more than $225 million in grants to train 15,000 people in the skills needed for high-growth fields of health care, including information technology. The grants will fund 55 training programs in 30 states, offered at community colleges and other local academic institutions.

The HHS and Labor grants are the latest distribution of a total of $100 billion investment in science, innovation and technology under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

An additional $385 million in grants will go to 40 states to advance the "development of platforms and frameworks to allow information to remain secure and private [when] exchanged across providers and hospitals," Sebelius said. "As you look at health IT, patient privacy is the top priority."

HHS anticipates hiring 3,000 technology workers to staff the health IT extension centers in the months ahead. The effort is slated to receive additional funds in March.

In January the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued an interim rule that sets initial standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria for e-health records technology, including security and privacy assurance.