CEOs Support Wired for Health Care Act
Today brings a guest column on healthcare quality and technology by Maria Ghazal, director of public policy with the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies with $4.5 trillion in annual revenues and more than 10 million employees.
Health IT Will Save Lives and Money - First We Need Policymakers to Wire Us for Health Care Quality
Imagine if every few days a passenger plane crashed while travelling across America. There would be a massive outcry over safety standards and America would want answers…the airline industry would be investigated, held accountable and would make the necessary changes to ensure air travel is as safe as possible. Shockingly, the equivalent is happening in the healthcare space and no one seems to notice. Every year as many as 98,000 people die due to preventable medical errors, the equivalent of a 747 crashing every two or three days, and yet there is no public outcry, no call for reform and no alteration to our current health care system.
This must change. I work for the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies such as Verizon, Aetna and General Motors – who are pushing Congress to recognize that the cost we currently pay for our outdated system, in both human lives and dollars, is unacceptable. Based on both their business experience and their insights from insuring more than 35 million Americans, Business Roundtable CEOs believe that utilizing health information technology, more commonly known as health IT, will provide better quality of care while saving money and ensuring the security of private medical information.
Advances in technology have been embraced by almost every industry in America, except the medical industry. It is amazing that we can download music while sipping a latte at our local Starbucks and pay bills on our cell phones, but we can’t walk into a doctor’s office or ER while on vacation and have our medical history available. Health IT enables our health information to keep pace with our lives; with it, people can keep their medical information with them at all times.
Electronic medical records aren’t just convenient, though – they help doctors save lives and Americans save money. Reducing the number of duplicate procedures, unnecessary lab tests, incorrect prescriptions and allowing doctors to use their time more efficiently could save $81 billion a year. This is more than double the level of annual U.S. public spending on all types of medical research. If you take into account all the indirect savings that would come from improved health, the total savings could be as much as $165 billion a year, enough to insure more than three-quarters of all uninsured Americans.
Unlike today’s paper-based security system, which relies on the sanctity of manila folders, health IT would finally provide the data protection necessary to ensure the privacy of people’s medical information. Health IT establishes a firewall around patient data, requiring passwords and permission to gain access…and leaving a trail of who accessed data, when and why.
The answer is clear: health IT must become a reality. Business Roundtable CEOs are standing by, waiting to develop and implement the technology needed to bring this system to life. All they need is a set of uniform, interoperable standards for health information technology platforms so that electronic medical records can be communicated and shared seamlessly among different providers.
What can you do? There is currently a bill before Congress that would create the legal authority for interoperable standards and provide America’s health care system with a much needed upgrade. Until Congress passes the bi-partisan “Wired for Health Care Act,” America’s health care system will continue to lag behind the times, to the extravagant price of 98,000 lives a year. E-mail your members of Congress today to urge them to pass this legislation.
Posted by Shawn Whalen on May 19, 2008 at 1:46 PM
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