HealthDay News -- Part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package President Barack Obama signed this past week contains programs that health advocates see as stage-setters for broader health reform.

"I think it's a recognition that both community and clinical prevention interventions are going to be a central component of health reform," said Jeff Levi, executive director of Trust for America's Health, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on preventing disease and improving community health.

"We are encouraged by the long-term investment made by Congress that brings us steps closer to health care reform," AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond said in a prepared statement.

The measure preserves $1 billion for prevention and wellness as part of a House-Senate compromise. Earlier, the Senate proposed spending $5.8 billion on prevention and wellness before striking it from the bill entirely. The final House version set aside $3 billion.

Health prevention advocates were, nevertheless, pleased with the outcome.

"This is a huge investment particularly on the community prevention side -- multiples of the current level of investment in these kinds of programs -- so I think we will still see a huge return on this investment," Levi said.

House and Senate leaders also agreed to provide $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research to compare the clinical outcomes, effectiveness and appropriateness of various drugs, devices, services and procedures. The provision made its way into law despite critics' insistence that a government-led effort to compare various treatments represents an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship. Opponents fear breaches of private information and insist that the information could be used to limit access to valuable treatments.

In an editorial under the headline "Health 'efficiency' can be deadly," The Washington Times blasted the measure for putting decisions about "what care will be limited, and who will be denied what services" into the hands of a 15-member advisory council. "One would think that the hard questions are the ones most in need of transparency and accountability, and not be buried in bureaucratic secrecy," it charged.

The Times also expressed concern about the future role of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (IT), which would oversee the use and exchange of electronic information.

In a sharp rebuke, leaders of the AARP and the American College of Physicians (ACP) said the editorial "grossly misleads" about the comparative effectiveness and health IT components of the package. Comparative effectiveness research "could save lives by giving doctors and patients better, more objective information to make important health care choices," wrote AARP Chief Executive Officer Bill Novelli and ACP Executive Vice President and CEO Dr. John Tooker. The Health IT initiative, they added, will provide information needed to "reduce errors, save time and improve care."

The measure includes $19 billion for health IT, which will help advance efforts to implement electronic medical records in physician offices.

"Having personal health records would help a lot in that it would make it a lot easier to coordinate the care by primary care physicians and also eliminate the duplication of tests, and it would also help a lot with [reducing] medication errors and other types of errors," said Edwina Rogers, executive director of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative in Washington, D.C., an advocate of the patient-centered medical home.

ACP supports efforts to speed adoption of health IT but is concerned that certain provisions of the measure will impede, rather than accelerate it.

Instead of establishing health IT policies, standards and certification processes from scratch, the government should recognize bodies and procedures that are already in place, ACP President Dr. Jeffrey P. Harris said in a recent letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. As an example, the National eHealth Collaborative, a public-private partnership representing a wide range of stakeholders dedicated to accelerating health IT adoption, has already developed an initial set of policy recommendations, he noted.

A significant chunk of the package -- some $87 billion -- would go toward helping states fund their Medicaid programs. Another $10 billion goes to the National Institutes of Health, with $8.5 billion targeted for research grants and $1.5 billion for research facility renovation.

In addition, $500 million will go toward health professions training programs, considered a vital component in the quest to expand the nation's pool of primary-care physicians.

"Studies show that primary care consistently is associated with better outcomes and lower costs of care, yet many primary care physician practices are at risk of closing their doors during these economic hard times and very few young physicians are choosing to go into primary care specialties," Dr. Harris cautioned in a recent letter to Congressional conferees.