Gingrich calls for 'virtual public health service'

As the Bush administration prepares for next week's unveiling of its strategy for updating the nation's information technology infrastructure for health care, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., told a House subcommittee Wednesday that the effort needs to come much faster than many anticipate.

"Paper kills," Gingrich told the House Government Reform Technology Subcommittee. "Paper prescriptions kill. Paper records kill. And if there's a public health emergency, paper will kill a lot of people," he said.

Gingrich said the nation needs to create "a virtual public health service" that ties together literally every health facility. In the case of a major nuclear event, he said, officials would need to mobilize every nursing home and long-term care facility as well as every veterinarian's office, "because all the downtown hospitals will be gone."

The federal government's main responsibility, Gingrich said, is to set standards for systems to be able to communicate with each other.

Otherwise, he said, "it will be like the beginning of the railroad era, where you had to change trains at every state line" because the tracks were different sizes.

Gingrich also said that the federal government should commit 1 percent of health spending toward improving health information technology. "If you did that, within three to four years you'd be in a different world," he said, with not only fewer medical errors and better data for research, but also lower costs.

"I can't understate the importance of forcing [the Congressional Budget Office] and [the Office of Management and Budget] to calculate what we're wasting now" with paper-based records systems. "It's inconceivable" that moving to electronic systems will not save money, he said.

Other witnesses at the hearing said the federal government is making slow progress toward more electronic-based records. "The federal government is taking a leadership role in setting a national strategy and implementing standards," said GAO's David Powner. But implementing those standards, he said, "remains a work in progress."

Richard Weisman, director of Florida's poison information center, testified about what happens when health facilities cannot communicate during a crisis.

After anthrax was discovered at the Florida offices of American Media International in 2001, he said, it took 36 hours for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to provide a fact sheet to his facility, well after panicked patients began showing up at physicians' offices and hospitals around South Florida.

"Not knowing if this valuable fact sheet was going to get to the emergency room physicians, we faxed the document to every emergency department. We subsequently learned that only half of hospitals ever received the fact sheet from the CDC and 10 percent never received the copy we faxed to the ER," he said in his statement.

CDC's Claire Broome told the subcommittee the federal government's new Public Health Information Network should address those difficulties.

The network's goal, she said, is for state and local health departments, clinical care facilities, federal agencies, public health laboratories, and law enforcement agencies all to be able to communicate with each other "in real time."