The Office of Personnel Management is asking health plans to work with it to launch a pilot e-prescribing program within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program next year.
Word of the pilot came as Congress turned up the pressure on OPM to ensure that the 8 million federal employees can have their health records online.
Two senators introduced a bill this week to require the plans to offer personal health records for federal employees, while the House Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on the federal workforce scheduled a markup of its comparable bill.
Daniel Green, OPM’s deputy associate director in charge of employee benefits, told the same House subcommittee about the e-prescribing pilot at a Sept. 1 field hearing in St. Louis.
“We believe this technology can provide efficiencies in the health care system with an early return on investment and can also assist in improving patient safety,” Green said in his written testimony.
Written prescriptions are notorious for being hard to decipher and time-consuming as pharmacists and patients make calls to doctors for clarification and to insurers for eligibility and payment information. Medication errors are common and can harm both the health and the pocketbooks of patients, as well as insurers. Green noted that an April 2004 report from the eHealth Initiative said e-prescribing could reduce the nation’s health care costs by as much as $27 billion per year.
“Technologies are already in place that could allow this to happen in the near term,” Green’s testimony said. “This is why we think the time is ripe for such a pilot within the FEHB Program.”
The Senate bill introduced by Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) would only apply to the FEHBP, but the opening sentence of the senators’ press release said the measure “would promote the use of electronic personal health records within the health care industry.”
The release said the bill, the Federal Employees Electronic Personal Health Records Act, “is designed to jump-start the adoption of this new technology.”
It is less far-reaching than the House bill, sponsored by Rep. Jon Porter (R-Nev.). The House version would require the FEHBP insurance carriers to create e-medical records for covered employees, then provide the information to the employees and their doctors online.
Porter scheduled a subcommittee markup of his bill, the Federal Family Health Information Technology Act, for Sept. 13. A staffer in Porter’s office said the lawmaker plans to modify the bill’s language to clarify that federal employees would not pay higher premiums as a result of the bill and to ensure that any savings the insurers achieve with EHRs will be plowed back into the FEHBP.
Less than a month ago, President Bush issued an executive order requiring federal agencies that contract for health care, including OPM, to require their contractors to use standards-compliant systems that can exchange health care records.
Government Health IT presents Liesa Jo Jenkins, executive director of CareSpark, in this recent eSeminar, where she shared her experiences and insight into building a health information exchange that enhances community health, rewards regional collaboration and drives economic progress.
