Health-care system needs overhaul, says HHS secretary Michael Leavitt
HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt vowed to push for better use of information technology in health care.
BY RUTHANN RICHTER
Before he became Secretary of Health and Human Services in January, Michael Leavitt had a maddening encounter with the medical care system that he says drove home some of the problems that now plague the system in this country.
Leavitt suffers from sleep apnea and uses a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine to help improve his breathing while he sleeps. When his old machine gave up, he decided to buy two new ones and was told by his insurance company they would cost him $985 apiece. Leavitt went on the Internet and found the same device for $380, but the insurer wasn't buying: it had a contract with a vendor for the higher cost machine and insisted he rent, not buy, the machine first.
Leavitt spent seven months mired in the bureaucracy, with calls and letters back and forth between his doctor and his insurer, before the insurer finally relented and authorized the purchase of one machine.
His conclusion: "The health-care system is saturated with inefficiency, and it leads to higher costs," he said.
That was one of the themes of the talk Leavitt gave Monday at the James H. Clark Center auditorium. A former Utah governor and chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Leavitt was in town to visit his brother, Matthew Leavitt, who's a second-year resident in pathology, but he took advantage of the occasion to address a crowd of about 125 faculty and staff about his agenda for improving health care in the United States.
Leavitt noted that per capita expenditures for health care in this country have tripled since 1960—from $143 to $570, with these costs now consuming 15.3 percent of our gross national product. The federal government has a vested interest in improving care delivery and reducing costs, as it bears $600 billion of the burden through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, he said.
Indeed, the Medicaid program, which supports care for low-income people, is "not sustainable in its current form," Leavitt declared, as it now drains 22 percent of state budgets, surpassing state investments in education.
Leavitt said he believes that many of the flaws in our system today, as well as its rising costs, can be traced back to antiquated information technology systems that prevent medical professionals and patients from freely exchanging information.
Accordingly, one of Leavitt's top goals is to establish a national system to monitor adverse reactions to drugs once they've been released into the market—an oft-cited concern with the federal Food and Drug Administration approval and monitoring process. But that kind of system can only be accomplished with an advanced, interactive network in which medical providers can share and pool data, he noted.
"If we continue to operate as a mainframe system in a network world, we will fail," Leavitt said.
He said he will be part of a major push at the federal level to establish unified standards for health information technology, including electronic medical records for patients. Such a system would help reduce medical errors while giving patients maximum control, he said.
"We ultimately have to get a system where patients own their own records," he said. "The day is not far off where we won't walk into a doctor's office and be handed a clipboard to fill out a form we've filled out a hundred times before."