The leaders of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee joined representatives of the Business Roundtable in calling once again for passage of the Wired for Health Care Quality Act.
Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee’s chairman, and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) acknowledged that the bill has been stalled by disagreements within the Senate over how to ensure the privacy of electronic health records.
“We are basically stalemated with the privacy provisions in the Judiciary Committee,” led by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Kennedy said. He added that he did not expect much, if any, opposition to the bill from the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over some health matters.
Leahy has introduced a strong privacy bill — the Health Information Privacy and Security Act — that Kennedy is co-sponsoring. But Kennedy’s committee has yet to act on it, and he said it is too expensive to win passage.
“Our point is, let’s get it started,” he said, referring to health information technology legislation.
“There will be data security,” Enzi said. “We don’t have to write it into law.” He added that it would be a mistake to put too many privacy and security provisions in the bill.
Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Verizon Communications, said privacy and security requirements should be established through the standards development process and enforced through third-party certification of health IT systems.
“The issue of security and privacy is easily handled” with current technologies, Seidenberg said.
He and Ronald Williams, chairman and CEO of Aetna, said passage of the bill would lay a foundation for health system reforms and save lives and dollars.
“Getting something done is better than hoping for something perfect,” Enzi said.
The Wired for Health Care Quality Act would legally establish the national coordinator for health IT in the Health and Human Services Department, create a new Partnership for Health Care Improvement to make recommendations to HHS on technical aspects of health IT standards and certification, require privacy protections and notification of disclosures of health information, provide grants and loans for doctors and hospitals of modest means, and foster the development of health care performance measures.
The bill won approval from the health committee last year but has not progressed since then. A similar bill is also languishing in the House. Observers say Congress is unlikely to pass much major legislation after midyear because of the presidential election.
The Business Roundtable is an association of CEOs of major corporations.
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.
