Modernizing Health Care Government pushes for more medical technology

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

Huge healthcare policy issues remain unresolved in Washington, but in just a few months this year, the feds have made dramatic moves on the technology side of the industry. They have been laying out crucial ground rules for how data will be shared, protected, collected, and used in the industry’s increasingly networked future. These rules will be essential if health care is to realize the boosts in efficiency and capability that the Internet promises.

The biggest story, HIPAA, may seem old and tired, but it has been imbued with new urgency and importance by an imposing fact: The security and privacy regulations actually took effect in mid-April, and the healthcare organizations they cover have two years to comply. Compliance, of course, means that insurers, clearinghouses, and some providers must take concrete administrative, physical, and technical steps to protect health data.

If HIPAA’s compliance requirements strike you as difficult to meet, you’re not alone. According to a January survey by the Health Information Management Systems Society, only 9 percent of providers and 5 percent of payers were ready for privacy compliance, and only 6 percent of providers and 11 percent of payers had their electronic transaction systems up to snuff. Sure, Uncle Sam didn’t finalize some of the rules until February, but crunch time for HIPAA is underway.

Not content merely to overhaul industry data security, the feds also are overhauling themselves. In March the departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, and Veterans Affairs announced that they will scrap their different data standards and uniformly adopt a set of industry standards for their healthcare data. Officials promise that a common data standard across the government’s agencies will yield better patient care and lower costs. The new standards cover an array of technologies such as the messages that carry transactions, prescription drug orders, medical images, and the interfaces that link medical devices with computers.

Also in March, the Food and Drug Administration proposed to combat medication errors by requiring that prescription medications carry barcode labels. The information stored in the barcode, combined with patient information systems, for example, could prevent hospital workers from giving a patient the wrong medication, administering a medication to which a patient is allergic, giving an incorrect dose, giving the medication at the wrong time, or delivering it in the wrong way (ie, orally instead of by injection). Some pharmaceutical companies and hospital suppliers had been moving toward bar coding, but the prospect of a mandate may speed that up and encourage a market for systems that can make use of the barcodes.

Not to be outdone, Congress got into the act. The same day as the FDA’s barcode announcement, the House of Representatives passed the “Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act.” The bill calls for voluntary standards for interoperability among healthcare information systems, grants to help healthcare providers build such systems, and a Medical Information Technology Advisory Board to advise the secretary of Health and Human Services about medical information technology.

Washington may not need yet another advisory board of stuffed shirts and talking heads, but what seems clear is that it wants action and lots of it in healthcare technology. The healthcare industry is notoriously slow in adopting information technology, but it seems the government is going to push it along.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@attbi.com.