Issue Position: Healthcare Quality and Technology

Issue Position

One critical first step is to bring our health care system into the 21st century. Right now, technology exists that would allow primary care physicians to push a button and send prescriptions to your pharmacy. It is conceivable that emergency room attendants could access your medical files with handheld computers in the blink of an eye. And, the capability exists to have the latest research in the hands of your doctor in days - rather than years. All these things can be done while protecting patient privacy and in the process save time, money and lives. But the information technology infrastructure simply is not there.

Last year, I worked with Senators Frist, Kennedy and Enzi to introduce the Wired for Health Care Quality Act, which will allow us to use information technology to develop a nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure to streamline our healthcare system, improve quality, reduce errors, and lower costs. Reducing the administrative costs of our medical system, which currently account for about one in four of our healthcare dollars, will allow us to redirect our scarce resources to more efficiently address other problems in our healthcare system, such covering the uninsured. I am committed to working with my colleagues to enact health IT legislation in the 110 th Congress.

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