The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has endorsed the major health information technology bill pending in the Senate, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act of 2007, with the understanding that the bill will be amended before it’s approved by the full Senate.
In a letter to the four chief sponsors of the bill, HIMSS President and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Lieber said his organization “strongly urge[s] you to complete action on this comprehensive piece of health information technology legislation” in 2007.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, headed by the bill’s sponsors, approved the bill in June. Some backers were predicting rapid passage by the full Senate, but senior members of the Senate Finance Committee have stymied that action because that committee has jurisdiction over Medicare and some other aspects of health care.
David Roberts, HIMSS vice president for government relations, said the amendments proposed in HIMSS’ letter to the sponsors were negotiated with the Senate committee staff and he believes they have been accepted.
One of the changes would remove one of the bill’s controversial sections relating to privacy and security of health information. Roberts said the privacy issues will be dealt with in a separate bill. The section would have extended the applicability of privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 to health information databases.
Other changes would allow Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to proceed with his plans to convert the American Health Information Community, his high-ranking advisory panel on health IT, to a public-private partnership outside government. However, the amended legislation would retain AHIC’s role “as the governmental body that deals with the policy issues that are government’s responsibility,” the letter states.
Those responsibilities include, but are not limited to, security and privacy policies, and interoperability use cases that are necessary to support federal health programs, it states.
“HIMSS believes there are very few opportunities this year to have comprehensive health IT legislation passed,” Roberts told Government Health IT, so it decided to back the Senate bill.
He said the society is visiting House members in an effort to get them to act on a companion to the Senate bill, introduced this month by Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). But Roberts said final House action on that bill is not likely until next year.
HIMSS has more than 20,000 individual members and more than 350 corporate members, its letter said.
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.
