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REMARKS BY:

Tommy G. Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services

PLACE:

Health IT Summit, Washington, D.C.

DATE:

July 21, 2004

Health IT Summit

I would like to thank

  • David Brailer (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology)
  • Don Lindberg (Director of the National Library of Medicine)
  • Dr. Bill Winkenwerder (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs)
  • Dr. Jonathon Perlin (Acting Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health)
  • Steve Benowitz (Associate Director of Personnel Management)

You are a distinguished, energetic, talented group of people. As President Kennedy said to a group of Nobel prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say, if he could be with us? If he saw all the advances, all the technology, all the changes?

I think he’d say – “What? You STILL don’t have an electronic health record?”

Virtually every other sector of the economy is charging ahead into the 21st century, and it is time for the health care industry to catch up.

For example, you can use your bank card in virtually any A-T-M in the world, from Bangkok to Moscow to Elroy, Wisconsin, to get your money and find out what the balance is in your checking account. But if you show up at an emergency room even 50 miles from home, you’ll have to scramble to track down your medical history.

In the media, editors lay out the entire newspaper on a computer - saving time and money and allowing them to get the latest news in the paper every day. But so much the money people spend on health care goes to maintaining and losing redundant paper records.

If you have a dog, you get an electronic reminder to update the dog’s shots. But few people get such reminders for their children.

Americans spend more resources on health care than people in any other industrialized nation. But we get the right treatment only 55% percent of the time. Think how much better our record will be when health care catches up with banking, journalism, and veterinarians.

Patients deserve advice and care from providers who are fully informed about their medical history, including past injuries, tests, diagnoses, and treatments, as well as whatever research results and public health notifications might be relevant. They shouldn’t have to wait for redundant tests or calls to their previous doctors.

Doctors deserve to focus on the quality of their care, not the quantity of their paperwork. And both patients and doctors deserve systems that will prevent medical errors before they become medical and legal problems.

To achieve these goals, Americans deserve a seamless and secure national health information infrastructure. This system must provide accurate, complete patient data to providers wherever they are, in time to be useful—even in an emergency. It must allow doctors to prescribe medications electronically, so the medications can be checked for safety before they are administered. And it must do all this without revealing personally identifiable information without the patient’s consent.

A good health information system could save our economy $131 billion a year. That’s about ten percent of our total health care spending.

We all know that a system that’s safer, faster, and more efficient isinevitable. It is inevitable because sooner or later patients will demand it when choosing doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies.

President Bush laid down a marker in April. He identified health information technology as one of the most important technology areas for America’s future. He said that within ten years, we should have electronic health records for most Americans. I think we can do it even sooner.

We’re already ahead of schedule. President Bush gave us 90 days to issue a report on a strategic plan for H.I.T., and with David Brailer’s hard work we’ve done it in 76.

The report we’re releasing today launches the Decade of Health Information Technology.

Our health care system needs all the help it can get. And health information technology is some of the best medicine we have.

We have taken several steps in the past few years: putting bar coding on medicines to prevent medical errors, adopting standards for the electronic exchange of medical information, and licensing a standardized lexicon of diagnoses and treatments, SNOMED, which I announced at last year’s summit.

Now it’s time for the next steps, and in today’s report we set out four overarching goals for the health information technology effort:

We need to bring these information tools directly to each point of care. Some private initiatives are already under way in Indianapolis and Santa Barbara. But we need them in all clinical settings.

We need to interconnect all these clinical settings.

We need to allow patients to become informed consumers and participants in their care. We call this aspect the Personal Health Record. You, as a patient, and all of your doctors will be able to see the data that the others have entered. This will ensure that treatment and diagnosis decisions can be informed decisions. If you turn up in the emergency room, the staff can see not only that you have diabetes, but what your blood sugar was the last time you checked it.

We need to improve population health and research with information technology. Health information in electronic form, and without any personal identification, can help us measure quality of care and respond much more quickly to disease outbreaks. And health information technology can be used to accelerate research findings into medical practice.

Those are the broad goals. David will talk about the twelve strategies we will follow for achieving them.

One of our immediate needs is better cost-benefit information. Patients, providers, and insurers want to know how much each will benefit from using health IT, so each can decide what kind of investment to make in adopting the technology. To answer these questions, I intend to appoint a new Health Information Technology Leadership Panel to assess the costs and benefits of health information technology.

Also, we need to consider new ways to share the benefits of health information technology. We will look at new reimbursement options for Medicare, like paying for specific uses of electronic health records.

Before doctors invest, they want to be sure that they won’t need to scrap the new system in a few years for a better one. The H.I.T. marketplace needs the kind of free-market product certification that other markets offer routinely. I’m pleased that the industry is developing an approach for certification of health information technology products.

My Department is committed to helping develop regional, state, and local information exchanges. We can help spark local efforts by providing seed money for these projects. Our Health Resources and Services Administration today is announcing contracts worth more than $2 million to help develop programs in nine cities.

Our AHRQ is spending $25 million over the next 5 years on state demonstrations of health care information exchange. And it is spending $45 million to demonstrate the impact of health information technology on patient safety and quality, with a strong emphasis on rural communities.

This summer, HHS will issue a Request for Information to assess whether a consortium of private companies could assist the rapid adoption of health information technology.

CMS is accelerating its regulations for e-prescribing and working to adopt basic standards in time for the new Medicare drug benefit in 2006. CMS is also announcing today that it will test an internet portal for Medicare beneficiaries this year in Indiana.

So the Decade of Health Information Technology has been launched. While government will have a role, only private companies can deliver the products and the constant innovation that will make this market work.

Our doctors have worked in the dark long enough. Working together, we can turn on the light.

Last Revised: July 21, 2004

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