Microsoft, several others endorse bill on e-health records incentives

Microsoft, e-health record vendor Allscripts and the American Heart Association have endorsed a bill that will give doctors $3 for every patient they move to e-health records.

The bill introduced Thursday by US Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, aimed to push for more widespread adoption of e-health records.

E-health records have been slow to catch on, partly because doctors haven’t embraced them.

The bill, titled The Personalized Health Information Act, would require the US Secretary of Health and Human Services to create an incentive program for doctors to convert their patients over to an electronic health record system. It provides incentives of $3 for every patient record the doctors converted to an electronic format over the next three years.

The proposed bill which some have estimated will save the healthcare industry $70 – $80 billion a year in efficiency alone, hopes of speeding up the adoption of electronic records from paper records.

A spokeswoman for Kennedy told IDG News Service that they did not yet have an estimate for how much the incentive program would cost.

E-health records is seen to cut health-care costs by reducing repetitive or conflicting records and tests and minimize conflicting medication prescriptions.

President George Bush has called on the U.S. government and private health-care providers to work together to provide e-health records to all residents by 2014. E-health records “are a critical piece of the puzzle as we move forward in an effort to improve the quality and cost efficiency of the health-care system in this country,” Kennedy said in a statement.

The bill would empower patients to be better informed and would also improve communication between them and their health-care providers, he said.

I’d like to believe that this bill is going to pass, especially if Kennedy’s group can come up with an estimate on how much the incentives program would cost. But still, I have some concerns about the access and confidentiality of doctor-patient records as well as about the security of the data.

Unless these concerns are addressed first, I don’t believe the bill should be passed.

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