The Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has passed the Wired for Health Care Quality Act, which promises to modernize health care by upgrading technology, reducing administrative costs and diminishing medical errors caused by lack of information.
The bill now goes to the full Senate for action. It is sponsored by a bipartisan group: Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who all said it was time Congress took action to address health care crises.
“We have a responsibility to make the miracles of modern medicine available to every American,” Kennedy said in a statement. “It’s long past time for the nation’s health care industry to adopt modern information technology. Such technology has revolutionized a wide array of American industries, and it holds the same promise for the health care industry. It has a clear capacity to increase efficiency and reduce costs at a time when the industry is being plagued by the alarming rise in health costs.”
The Wired for Health Care Quality Act would create a series of funding mechanisms that would encourage health care professionals to purchase systems for electronic medical records and other clinical applications.
The bill also would create a demonstration program to integrate qualified health IT into the clinical education of health professionals and encourage providers to use decision-support software to reduce the number of medical errors.
In a press release, Kennedy emphasized that “staggering inefficiencies” still plague the U.S. health care system. More than 40 percent of Americans encounter preventable medical errors. IT can help reduce those errors, he said, and the Senate bill would provide the necessary funding to reach that goal.
“This is an important day for patient safety and health care quality,” Clinton said, echoing that sentiment. “With this committee’s action, we are a step closer to finally realizing the potential of health information technology to lower skyrocketing health care costs and improve the quality of care Americans receive by reducing medical errors, wasteful duplication and other inefficiencies in our health care system.”
The legislation calls for the establishment of a new organization known as the Partnership for Health Care Improvement. The public/private partnership would provide recommendations to the Health and Human Services Secretary regarding technical aspects of interoperability, standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria for the exchange of health information.
To address privacy, which is the public’s main concern about electronic health information, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act would require that patients receive notification when someone wrongfully discloses their medical information.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
