Political Quotes

“This bipartisan amendment, offered by myself and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelly), would strike section 510, which bans HHS from adopting standards for a unique patient identifier that would allow patients to be uniquely identified across electronic health record systems. In the last 21 years that this misguided policy has been in place, thousands of Americans have died due to giving the wrong drug to the wrong patient or due to incorrect or incomplete electronic medical records, all arising from the inability to simply and correctly merge health records from different systems. Countless man-hours have been lost trying to figure out whether one patient's information is the same as another whose name might be spelled differently, or who has recently moved to a new city or State, or who might be under a maiden name, for example. Matching records properly requires a unique identifier for each patient. A Federal ban on doing this properly makes our healthcare system more expensive and less safe for patients. According to a 2016 study of healthcare executives, 86 percent of respondents have witnessed or knew of a medical error that was the result of patient misidentification. A Johns Hopkins study recently calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to preventable medical errors.…”