Senate Mulls Stimulus Funds for Health IT - Page 2

One of the flash points in the debate over health IT is privacy. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have raised dire warnings about the risk that digitizing health records could pose to people's most sensitive information. In response, the witnesses agreed that secure systems and privacy assurances would be critical to getting the public on board with health IT.

The question of data standards raised one of the few points of dissent in an otherwise unanimous endorsement of government support for health IT. Representatives from the Government Accountability Office and the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit group focused on improving the healthcare system, said that the government should insist on standards to ensure that information from various providers' systems would be interoperable.

But from Microsoft's point of view, waiting for a standards body to deliberate would delay a long-overdue IT upgrade. Insisting on standards while the health IT initiatives are still rapidly evolving would also threaten to curtail future innovations, Neupert said.

"The data exists today," he said. "We don't need to just invest in the creation of new electronic data. I really would focus on the near-term stimulus to leverage the existing data assets that are out there," such as prescriptions, lab tests and medical images.

"If we can just get those data starting to move today in health information exchanges, we can go a long way toward enabling and empowering both consumers and their physicians to deliver better outcomes right away. Then we can do the hard work of thinking about holistically how we can reform the system."

Microsoft's health IT product, called HealthVault, serves as a hub where patients can cull together their medical records from a host of care providers. Getting every doctor's systems to directly communicate with each other would be a daunting, long-term project, Neupert said.

While the question remains unanswered of how data must be formatted to qualify for federal funding, the ultimate aim of health IT remains clear to Mikulski.

"If this isn't interoperable, nothing is going to achieve our goals," she said.

Mikulski promised more hearings on how the government should handle health IT as it moves toward a more comprehensive reform of the healthcare system.