June 13, 2005

Bringing Healthcare Into The Information Age

By Congressman Joe Pitts

Healthcare and railroad tracks.  These were the topics of remarks delivered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt during a meeting recently. 

He said that the challenges facing our health care system were much like those once facing America ’s railroads.  In the 19^th Century locomotive operators and designers found that the gauge of railroad tracks – the distance between the rails – varied as much as foot in some places because of various standards employed by private companies.  Use of railroads during the Civil War, however, demonstrated the need to adopt a uniform standard, which the Lincoln Administration implemented, in order to facilitate faster troop movement and increase commerce along railroad routes.

Secretary Leavitt compared the challenge of rail gauge, the westward expansion of our nation, and the role of the federal government in discussing the challenges we face with Health Information Technology (Health IT) today. 

Health IT, the idea that hospitals and medical professionals can save money and charge less for services rendered by reducing paperwork and saving time, plays a central role in plans to reduce healthcare costs for families.   By computerizing records, costs associated with medical errors, paperwork processing, and missed treatments could reduced, if not practically eliminated. 

During a visit to an American city Secretary Leavitt visited three health centers within close proximity to each other.  Altogether, these health centers had spent $100 million to computerize much of its record-keeping and patient information.  The problem, Secretary Leavitt found, was that technology employed at the each of the three centers would not interact with technology at any of the others, let alone other health centers around that city or around the nation.

The Institute of Medicine cites medical errors as the cause of death for between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans each year.  Thousands more receive the wrong treatments or delayed treatments because of the cumbersome paperwork process employed by the nation’s healthcare providers.  Studies have found that as much $300 billion is spent each year on treatments that offer no benefit to patients.

Improvements in health IT would begin to turn the tide, according to former Speaker of House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.  Writing in The Forward, Mr. Gingrich said that, “health information technology saves lives and saves money…”  He and co-author David Merritt cite the following examples:

• Indiana Heart Hospital ’s new paperless facility has reduced medication errors by 85 percent and physician administrative time by 30 percent;
• Danville (Virginia) Regional Medical Center prevented more than 1,200 wrong drugs and doses and saved more than $730,000 by switching to an electronic prescribing system;
• Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network prevented 50 medication errors per month with its new computer system; and,
• Central Utah Multi-Specialty Clinic saved nearly $1 million and estimates $14 million more in savings over the next five years because of a switch to an electronic medical record system.

Despite, the costs saved by these individual facilities, we have considerable work to do before these savings can be realized by the rest of the system, let alone patients.  We must work to address both cost of making the switch and compatibility among systems.

Similar to the railroad tracks, this is where the federal government can offer unique leadership.  By offering grants and tax incentives, Washington can help smaller health clinics and hospitals handle the costs of switching to electronic record keeping.  By enacting a set of standards, Washington can make sure that the various technologies developed in the private sector, by companies like Siemens Medical Systems in our area, interact with each other.

Our goal here would be to create a health IT system which:

• Consolidates patient records giving a doctor or EMT instant access to that patient’s medical history;
• Protects the privacy of these medical records;
• Offers doctors access to information about the latest medicines and treatment options for patients; and,
• Allows various software programs and technology to interact.

Health IT is among the top issues on Congress’ healthcare agenda this year because of the promise it holds to offer help with lowering the cost of healthcare for families and for providers.

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