REMARKS BY:
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Tommy G. Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services
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PLACE:
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Health IT Summit, Washington, D.C.
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DATE:
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July 21, 2004
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Health IT Summit
I would like to thank
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David Brailer (National Coordinator for Health Information
Technology)
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Don Lindberg (Director of the National Library of Medicine)
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Dr. Bill Winkenwerder (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health
Affairs)
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Dr. Jonathon Perlin (Acting Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs
for Health)
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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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