Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt is concerned that the health information technology bill pending in the Senate “would create significant barriers to continued progress already under way,” he said in a June 26 letter.
Writing to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Leavitt took exception to several portions of the bipartisan Wired for Health Care Quality Act that the committee approved on a voice vote. It is awaiting action by the full Senate.
The secretary, who said the Office of Management and Budget concurred with his comments, said he and Kennedy have a “shared goal of ensuring interoperable health IT by 2014” and noted what he called the chairman’s dedication to health IT.
But Leavitt objected to provisions concerning the American Health Information Community and a new organization the bill would create, called the Partnership for Health Care Improvement.
Noting that he is trying to move AHIC out of government, the secretary said “the draft legislation would undo what is presently a successful health IT public/private partnership and stop current work in its tracks.” He decried the bill’s provisions calling for Congress to appoint AHIC members and said that “adding a second advisory committee…would be counterproductive – adding an additional layer of complexity to the health IT governance structure.”
Without changes in the provisions concerning the two advisory panels, the letter states, “the [Bush] administration would oppose passage of this legislation.”
Leavitt also expressed disagreement with the bill’s provisions to create grant programs to spur health IT adoption. “The most appropriate and efficient ways to achieve widespread use of health IT are through market forces, rather than through direct subsidization of health IT purchases,” the letter states.
He also objected to provisions that would create quality reporting organizations, require HHS to designate a single organization to promote development of performance measures for health care, establish a health resource center in HHS, and extend the privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 to operators of EHR repositories and exchanges.
“HHS and AHIC have been giving consideration to what kind and level of privacy and security protections should apply to various kinds of entities that may be included in the language of this section,” Leavitt wrote, and it would be premature to extend HIPAA coverage.
The secretary also had complaints about other provisions of the bill, such as the language about adoption of standards and publication of quality measures.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
