President Obama’s Health Care Summit last week was seen as the opening salvo in the coming battle for health care reform in the United States. But before we gear ourselves up for that conflict, it’s worth pausing for a moment to note that the president - in less than two months in office - already has a substantial legacy of major health reform to his credit. 

Take for example efforts to get doctors and hospitals to use the latest information technology. The “HITECH” bill is one relatively minor component of the mind-bendingly massive $787 billion stimulus package passed last month. This single piece of legislation, though, increases federal investment in health information technology by 12,000 percent, according to the California HealthCare Foundation. This is no mean feat and it comes not a moment too soon.

As consumers of health care, we regularly use online tools such as WebMD to check out whether we should treat the symptoms that we and our families are having at home or whether we should go to the doctor’s office. We may be shocked, therefore, in the age of Google and Blackberry, at how relatively primitive our doctors’ offices often are in terms of their use of IT. Handling drug prescriptions over the internet is one of the simplest uses of technology in this area. Yet as of 2007, only 1.2% of prescriptions in California were done electronically, outside of the highly networked systems of Kaiser and the Veterans Administration. This major new federal investment may help revolutionize the use of IT in health care delivery.

The stimulus package also devoted $1.1 billion to “comparative effectiveness” research. Again, this is a drop in the bucket of the total cost of the package. But it is an investment that may transform how health care is delivered in the United States. It will help give doctors and hospitals better information to evaluate how new medicines, therapies, and procedures stack up against those that are already in the market. New is often, but not always, better.

And investments in technology and comparative effectiveness research are only two transformative pieces of health care legislation. We also witnessed the expansion of children’s health insurance and the extension of COBRA coverage as well as the provision of billions of additional dollars for the National Institute of Health, community health centers, and health workforce investments. The list of projects funded with stimulus dollars goes on and on and on and certainly isn’t confined just to health care.

Together these projects and programs – already funded and now being implemented – could easily represent a presidential term’s worth of accomplishments. Not that Obama and Congressional health care policy leaders such as Senators Kennedy and Baucus, and House chairmen Waxman, Miller and Rangel intend to rest on these laurels. Working together with HHS Secretary-designate Sebelius, they are pushing forward on comprehensive reform to the nation’s health care system. But, it is impossible to deny that quite a bit has been accomplished before the drive to enact comprehensive health reform has even begun.