Posted on 10/20/2007 5:23:11 PM PDT by cool2007
WASHINGTON – In a move to get healthcare information technology legislation passed before the close of this year, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif. ) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich. ) introduced yesterday the Promotion of Health Information Technology (HIT) Act.
According to Eshoo, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Health subcommittee, the law will accelerate the adoption of healthcare IT and increase the efficiency of the U.S. healthcare system. Story Continues Below Advertisement
Former Sen. John Breaux and former Rep. Nancy Johnson, co-chairs of the Health IT Now! Coalition applauded the bill, saying there is no time to waste in passing healthcare IT legislation this year.
“We commend the leadership of Representatives Eshoo and Rogers for introducing critical health IT legislation that will save lives, improve patient care and reduce the cost of health care by billions of dollars,” Breaux said.
The bill promotes widespread adoption of healthcare IT and sets a date for establishing interoperability standards. It also provides grants and loans to providers, empowers public-private partnerships, and codifies aspects of the federal healthcare IT advancement effort.
"We live in the Information Age, but healthcare, one of the most information-intensive segments of our economy, remains mired in a pen-and-paper past,” Eshoo said. “This is a disservice to patients and to our healthcare system. Speeding the adoption of health information technology will have a powerful effect on enhancing patient safety, reducing medical errors, improving the quality of care and reducing healthcare costs.”
According to Eshoo, the bipartisan Act will increase the deployment of healthcare IT by streamlining the process for the adoption of HIT interoperability standards. It requires the federal government to abide by those standards, and it authorizes funding to promote healthcare IT adoption nationwide. The bill also includes strong patient protections.
The bill also:
• Creates the Partnership for Health Care Improvement, a public-private advisory body to recommend or endorse appropriate HIT interoperability standards and timeframes for adoption;
• Authorizes funding for grants to assist state and local governments adopt and promote HIT within their states;
• Provides incentives for utilizing broadband to deliver HIT in underserved areas and authorizes funding to train qualified HIT professionals.
The legislation has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Proponents of the bill and legislative analysts say healthcare IT legislation is a long shot to pass this year with Congress wrangling over refunding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and other domestic issues.
One factor in the present record keeping is that it is difficult to locate the records of someone unless they tell the snooper where to snoop.
The danger that Electronic Medical Records (EMR) present is when they are implemented in ways that consolidate medical data in ways that make it easy for government to troll, scan, monitor and snoop, especially if they get consolidated in database service bureaus.
The typical “strong laws” are not enough, for it will be only moments from the time a EMR database is set up before some lawyer for either a government regulatory or law enforcement agency will present his compelling case to a judge for him to direct access to the requested data.
If we think electronic toll booth and cell phone location records are a danger to privacy, we have not seen anything yet.
If EMR databases are kept localized, dispersed and offline from outside access, then it will be almost as difficult to intrude on the privacy of patient data.
We will face a substantial degredation of privacy should these records become easy to access by anyone other than the medical people who need them. People who insist that any doctor, anywhere to access their files in case they are involved in an accident some distance from home are perfectly free to carry all those records on a flash drive storage pendant. I don’t want anyone to be able to access my records unless I authorize it.
Remember: the **only** way to prevent government from violating your privacy is to prevent government from having the means to violate it. The Iron Law of how government relates to databases is: if someone stores it, they will snoop.
Yeah...right....like Bill Clinton (or Hillary, Or Oprah, Or Rush, or, Madonna, or ?)......will have his/her “medical records” in THIS database.......uh huh....
I keep MY OWN records.....even going so far as to “confiscate” xrays whenever possible from whomever I paid to get them done.....I AM IN CHARGE OF MY HEALTHCARE.....NOT the US Government!
It’s long been known that medical record-keeping is still in the Bob Crachit age. There have been some interesting conjectures as to how many lives are lost each year due to physician’s handwriting, etc.
The question being that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about modernizing this. How would one do it so as to empower the patient/customer rather than big brother?
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