Political Quotes

“This bipartisan amendment offered by Mr. Kelly and me and supported, also, by Mr. Schweikert and Dr. Bera, would strike section 510, which bans HHS from adopting standards for a unique patient identifier that would allow patients to be identified uniquely across electronic health record systems. In the 21 years that this misguided policy has been in place, tens of thousands of Americans have died due to getting 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. 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. A Johns Hopkins study recently calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical errors, and patient misidentification is a significant contributor to this. {time} 1445 This ban is also handcuffing us in our fight against opioids. A 2018 roundtable on the opioid crisis, cohosted by HHS and the nonprofit Center for Open Data Enterprise, recommended the generation of a unique identifier for each patient.…”