Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of H.R. 4245, the Veterans' Electronic Health Record Modernization Oversight Act of 2017. When I first came to Congress back in 2007, as a veteran myself, one of the questions we asked was--Electronic medical records had been out there for quite some time. The VA was a pioneer in their VistA System, on VistA, on managing health, and it is not just a database. As Dr. Dunn knows well, these are important diagnostic tools and they have to be right. But the thing that every veteran for 20 years was saying was: Why do we have one medical record in the Department of Defense, so when we leave the Army, the Navy, the Marines, or the Air Force, we drop off a cliff--we all carry around a paper file they print out to us--and then we try to get back into the VA and it is an entirely different system that doesn't talk to one another? It seems pretty self-evident that from the time you raise your hand until the time you are buried with honors, it would make sense that we had a joint electronic medical record. That was the genesis of this. I am proud to say that it was a long road, but we had the signing of the Cerner contract.…”