The eHealth Connection

America's health care industry may have many marvels, but information technology is not one of them. By the standards of most other industries, it is just starting to emerge from the digital Dark Ages. Patient data is fragmented among providers and is difficult to transmit or share. Bills and payments move at a glacial pace. Paperwork still consumes untold hours that would be better spent improving service to patients.

As Lake Forest, Calif.-based Apria Healthcare's new chief information officer Jeri Lose puts it, the industry is “way, way behind.”

The problem has not escaped notice from the federal government, which apparently has decided to do something about it. Washington has figured out that it has a big stake in efficiency, since it directly pays about 32 percent of the nation's nearly $2 trillion in health care spending.

President Bush has set a goal of having electronic health records for most Americans in 10 years, and his budget for the 2006 fiscal year proposes spending $125 million on health care IT toward that end. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt recently called for a public-private effort to create standards for health records and achieve interoperability so that the records could be read by all concerned.

And late last month, word came that CMS may soon announce details of a program that will offer physicians low-cost EHR software, which would be a major step forward in securing their buy-in to a nationwide network.

Earlier this summer, there were at least nine bills in Congress aimed at promoting information technology to make health care more effective and efficient. Most were bipartisan, such as Senate Bill 1262, a measure sponsored by two politicians who conceivably could be facing off in the 2008 presidential election — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Another, S.1355, was introduced by a competing team of Sens. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. The two bills had different price tags and funding rules, but their goals were similar: to further the adoption of health IT by the nation's health care providers.

In July, the competing bills were combined into a single piece of legislation called the Wired for Health Care Quality Act, which was quickly approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (See sidebar on page 22.)