Hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions - The Role of Information Technology in Improving Health Care

Hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions - The Role of Information Technology in Improving Health Care

Mikulski Chairs Senate Hearing on the Role of Information Technology in Improving Health Care

Hearing is first in a series Mikulski plans to hold focused on quality in overhauling America's fragmented health care system

U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), a senior member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee and Chairwoman of its Subcommittee on Retirement and Aging, today held a hearing focused on saving lives and saving money in health care by examining ways to achieve paperless, interoperable, and secure health information technology.

The U.S. lags behind the industrialized world in the adoption of Health IT - even though it has the potential to improve the quality of patient care. Effective HIT implementation can reduce tragic medical errors and give health providers timely access to patient medical history. Health IT also has the potential to increase efficiency by reducing costly medical duplication, facilitate data collection on clinical outcomes, and drive down administrative costs of 20th Century health care.

Witnesses at the hearing, Investing in Health IT: A Stimulus for a Healthier America, included Jack Cochran, Executive Director of the The Permanente Federation; Janet Corrigan, President of the The National Quality Forum; Valerie Melvin, Director of Information Technology for the The Government Accounting Office; Peter Neupert, Vice President of Microsoft Health Solutions; and Mary Grealy, President of the Health Leadership Council.

Senator Mikulski was tapped by HELP Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to lead a Senate work group on improving health care quality as part of a comprehensive effort to strengthen America's health care system. Today's hearing was the first in a series of hearings Senator Mikulski plans to hold on health care quality.

Senator Mikulski's opening statement follows:

"Today we will hear from a panel of experts about the importance of establishing a secure, interoperable, patient centered and user friendly national health information technology (HIT) infrastructure. I want to thank our witnesses today who I am confident will add value to HIT policy debate and implementation.

"The Institute of Medicine has identified several ways to provide consistent, high-quality medical care to patients. The IOM cites the adoption of health information technology as key to transforming our nation's health care delivery system.

"Yet, the U.S. lags behind industrialized nations when it comes to the adoption, per capita investment, and length of experience with HIT. While industrialized nations like Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and others are approaching an electronic health record implementation that nears 100 percent.

"Recent surveys report that just 4 percent of U.S. physicians have fully functional electronic health records; that just 17 percent of U.S. physicians have basic electronic health records and just 1 to 2 percent of U.S. patients access a personal health record through an HIT application.

"It is no coincidence that in addition to lack of nationwide HIT, the U.S. also has the highest number of preventable deaths among leading industrialized nations. That translates into 1.5 million preventable injuries each year and as many as 98,000 avoidable hospital deaths.

"Successful HIT adoption has tremendous potential benefits for patients, providers and payers, including quality improvements, efficiencies in medical utilization and economic savings. For example, quality improvements could mean preventing costly medical errors, particularly avoidable medication errors, by 50 to 90 percent. HIT could provide clinical decision support systems that remind physicians to schedule tests and help diagnose complicated conditions. And HIT efficiencies could mean cutting the cost of delivering care by avoiding duplicated or inappropriate diagnostic tests, promoting the appropriate use of prescription drugs, reducing paperwork, and even reducing the length of hospital stays.

"However, the potential of HIT is much easier predicted than achieved in practice. Our challenge is to promote the use of health IT so that the potential benefits are realized nationwide. My hope is that today we will hear ideas on how best to design, implement, and update a nationally interoperable system that protects privacy, improves quality, and is patient-centered. I want to hear about real life examples of HIT's potential and generate an understanding of the potential pitfalls we should avoid so that we can work together to maximize the efficiency of a national HIT policy.

"As chairwoman of Chairman Kennedy's Health Quality workgroup, I look forward to working with my colleagues on ideas of how to not only save lives, but save money. We can truly work in a bipartisan way to deliver better value and better efficiency to our health care spending by emphasizing ways to improve quality such as the adoption of HIT and toward guaranteeing that all Americans have affordable and high quality health coverage," Senator Mikulski said.

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