Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it is a pleasure to join the Senator from Nebraska. I love the idea of the surf-and-turf caucus reaching across the country to try to find commonsense solutions. I often think about legislation and what we are attempting to do, and there is an attempt to codify common sense, to try to bring to the regulatory process, as it deals with medical devices, a little more thoughtfulness and cautiousness as it affects health information technology. The first part of the bill actually sets up a process whereby we can examine in a thoughtful kind of way some of these issues to reduce the regulatory burden and at the same time foster innovation and, very importantly, protect patient safety. It sets up a process involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other parts of the administration so that the regulatory process in this area can be rationalized across agencies and better coordinated. The heart of the bill, however, as the Senator just outlined, is our attempt to differentiate between medical software, which has a direct impact upon patient health, and software that is more peripheral and can range from the app I have on my iPhone, which is a pedometer that tells me how much I have walked each day and how much I should walk each day, to the kind of software that is being developed across the country to assist medical practices in their billing and in the operational part of the medical business.…”