Kentucky Enacts Far-reaching E-Health Network Legislation

From Health-IT World:

Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher, M.D., last week
signed legislation to create a statewide electronic health information
network and establish an academic research partnership that boosters
say could become a foundation for national healthcare reform. The
signing caps a four-year effort by Sen. Daniel Mongiardo, M.D., an
otolaryngologist from the Appalachian town of Hazard, Ky., who is the
state legislature’s only practicing physician. The governor, a
Republican, is a non-practicing family physician.

"We hope this will become the backbone for the
national health information network," Mongiardo said. More importantly,
he said that the law will help research play a greater role in
healthcare policy-making traditionally dominated by politics.

"We’ve got to bring science and scientific
research into the future of healthcare," said Mongiardo. "We can then
deliver to Congress on a silver platter reform that can be applied
nationally."

I like his attitude!

Health, aging and economics

Excerpts from two articles relating to the high cost of health and aging in our future.

Illness triggers half of bankruptcies

Medical bills and illnesses are a
major cause of roughly half of this country’s personal bankruptcies, according
to the study published today on the Web site of the journal Health Affairs.

Touted as the first in-depth
analysis of medical causes of bankruptcy, the study looked at 1,771 court
records of people who filed for bankruptcy in 2001 in five federal districts,
including one in Illinois. More than half of those bankruptcy filers were
interviewed in detail about their finances and health. The researchers
determined that 46.2 percent to 54.5 percent of the nearly 1.5 million personal
bankruptcy filings in 2001 could be chalked up, in large part, to medical
problems.

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High-Tech Alliance on Base for a Digital Health Network

This NYTimes article says that eight of the heavies in the computer and softwared industry have agreed to adopt open standards for a health information network. So there’s hope of getting somewhere…

Eight of the nation’s largest technology companies, including  I.B.M.,  Microsoft and  Oracle,
have agreed to embrace open, nonproprietary technology standards as the
software building blocks for a national health information network.

A crucial step, health care specialists say, will be to agree on
technology standards for sending health data across the network and
sharing information, when appropriate, among doctors, hospitals,
insurers and researchers.

A national health information network, analysts say, would not only improve the efficiency in America’s fragmented health care system, but would also create an attractive market for information technology products and services. The eight companies in the consortium are I.B.M., Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Computer Sciences.

Right to know crippled again!

Once again the right of taxpayers to see the results of NIH research they paid for promptly was hobbled to protect the profits of publishing companies. Surprize, surprize!  From the WP:

An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research
available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the
National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who
argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific
enterprise they support.

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