Stimulus Bill Includes Money to Help Computerize Health Records
Healthrecords
The New Bedford Standard-Times
Cristian Hernandez
Boston University Washington New Service
01/29/09
WASHINGTON – Nestled inside Barack Obama’s $819 billion economic recovery package are provisions that challenge the country’s hospitals and doctors to adopt electronic medical records. The stimulus package, which the House passed on Wednesday, provides $20 billion to spur the complete digitization of health records by 2014.
Christopher Baldwin, Southcoast Health System’s vice president of information services, applauds the president’s efforts. Southcoast hospitals are already on their way to being paperless with a $20 million health information technology investment approved in 2005, Baldwin said.
“We expect the conversion to take an additional five years, and the support of the Obama administration will assist us in moving this process along faster,” he said.
Baldwin said Southcoast is facing shrinking funds because of changes in the national economy and prospective cutbacks in reimbursements from MassHealth. “The support of the Obama administration will assist us in moving further and faster through this transitional process,” he said.
Lawmakers are unsure about how to go about implementing a national electronic records initiative. At a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the members talked about creation of a federal body that would create regulations and standards to guide the process. The $20 billion would be distributed to doctors and hospitals in the form of grants and tax breaks.
Jane Horowitz, the chief operating officer for the National Alliance for Health Information Technology, said that hospitals all over the country are grappling with the nation’s financial crisis and are delaying information technology projects.
Supporters of the health technology provisions say the national system of electronic records will allow for better health care and be more cost-effective. Research points in that direction; according to a study last November by the Archives of Internal Medicine, Massachusetts doctors who have electronic records systems pay fewer malpractice claims then those who don’t.
But public doubts about privacy and safety threaten to hinder the move to digitized records. During the Judiciary Committee hearing, lawmakers were told that without the public’s trust the initiative would fail.
“The ability to easily access this information electronically can be very useful in providing more cost-effective health care,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the committee, said during the hearing. “But the use of advancing technologies to access and share health information can also lead to a loss of personal privacy.”.
The public is fearful that personal health records will be easily accessible to employers, sold or made available to health insurers, according to privacy advocates.
Ashley Katz, executive director of Patient Privacy Rights, a non-profit working to secure patient privacy, said in a telephone interview that provisions in the House and Senate bills that ban the sale of personal information are a good first step toward ensuring security.
“Privacy is the key to getting health IT going,” Katz said. “If you don’t do it right we are never going to get there.”
Baldwin said Southcoast will double its efforts to ensure privacy within its system, calling it a high-priority issue as the hospital system moves to a 100 percent paperless system.
The provisions have received broad support from members of Congress, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who has been a longtime supporter of electronic medical records. In a written statement, Kennedy said that tens of thousands of Americans die every year because of preventable medical errors. Electronic records allow patients to carry their health records from doctor to doctor, giving new doctors a complete picture of the patients’ medical history.
“Information technology can reduce errors significantly, yet the gap is widening each year in implementing it,” Kennedy said. “It now costs a physician’s office $40,000 to install a new IT system. Increasingly, our public hospitals and community health centers remain in the dark ages.”
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