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HHS
Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today announced two new steps in building a
national electronic health care system that will allow patients and their
doctors to access their complete medical records anytime and anywhere they are
needed, leading to reduced medical errors, improved patient care, and reduced
health care costs.
First,
the Secretary announced that the Department has signed an agreement with the
College of American Pathologists (CAP) to license the College's standardized
medical vocabulary system and make it available without charge throughout the
U.S. This action opens the door to establishing a common medical language as a
key element in building a unified electronic medical records system in the U.S.
Secondly,
the Secretary announced that HHS has commissioned the Institute of Medicine to
design a standardized model of an electronic health record. The health care
standards development organization known as HL7 has been asked to evaluate the
model once it has been designed. HHS will share the standardized model record
at no cost with all components of the U.S. health care system. The Department
expects to have a model record ready in 2004.
Today's
announcements are part of the ongoing HHS effort to develop the National Health
Information Infrastructure by encouraging and facilitating the widespread use
of modern information technology to improve the nation's health care system.
"Banks
and other financial institutions all across the country can talk to each other
electronically, which has streamlined customer transactions and reduced
errors," Secretary Thompson said. "We want to do the same thing for
the American health care system. We want to build a standardized platform on
which physicians' offices, insurance companies, hospitals and others can all
communicate electronically, which will improve patient care while reducing the
medical errors and the high costs plaguing our health care system."
With
terms for more than 340,000 medical concepts, the College's standardized system
has been recognized as the world's most comprehensive clinical terminology
database available. The licensing agreement with the CAP will make it possible
for health care providers, hospitals, insurance companies, public health
departments, medical research facilities and others to easily incorporate this
uniform terminology system into their information systems.
"This
system will prove invaluable in facilitating the automated exchange of clinical
information needed to protect patient safety, detect emerging public health
threats, better coordinate patient care and compile research data for patients
participating in clinical trials," Secretary Thompson said.
The CAP
agreement announced today will be administered through the National Library of
Medicine (NLM), a component of HHS' National Institutes of Health (NIH). NLM
has issued a 5-year, $32.4 million contract to the College for a permanent
license for their terminology, known as SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of
Medicine) Clinical Terms. The licensing agreement includes the core database in
both English and Spanish along with regular updates. The terms of the contract
include a one-time payment-shared by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the
Department of Defense, and many HHS agencies-with annual update fees to be
borne by the NLM.
"Today
we take a bold step by making SNOMED available, a critical step in adopting
health information standards across the federal government," Secretary of
Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi said. "Putting health information
standards in the public domain and promptly adopting health information
standards for the federal health partners, is the 'tipping point' for national
standards that strengthen our electronic health record systems, help optimize
our health care, and, most importantly, improve the health of veterans as well
as all of the people of the U.S."
"The
Department of Defense is pleased to have contributed to the government-wide
effort to license SNOMED. This effort will enable us to better share health
information within the Federal government and beyond. I am delighted with our
Federal partnership in this important step toward improving health care for all
Americans," said Dr. Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for
health affairs.
"This
license validates the College's longstanding support for the development of
medical standards like SNOMED to further improve the quality of health care. It
ensures that government and the private sector entities in the U.S. will be
able to use a common approach to clinical coding, making it easier to
coordinate care and exchange needed information," said Paul A. Raslavicus,
MD, president of the CAP.
The
contract between NLM and the College of American Pathologists comes after three
years of negotiations. The effort was supported by all the agencies
participating in the Consolidated Health Informatics initiative (CHI), which is
working to adopt government-wide standards for clinical health data. CHI is the
health care component of President Bush's eGov Initiatives, created under the
President's Management Agenda, to make it easier for citizens and businesses to
interact with the government, save taxpayer dollars and streamline
citizen-to-government transactions. More information on CHI and the President's
eGov Initiatives may be found at http://www.egov.gov.
NLM will
distribute SNOMED through its Unified Medical Language System, which
incorporates, links, and distributes in a common format 100 different
biomedical and health vocabularies and classifications. Details of the SNOMED
license arrangement as well as information on obtaining access to the SNOMED
database may be found at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/Snomed/snomed_announcement.html.
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Last Revised:
July 1, 2003