Nobody but the liberal media and their captive audience ever believed for a minute that the anthrax attack was the work of domestic "right wingers".
Good find, T.
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Anthrax scare rekindles idea of national health database
November 30, 2001 print edition
American City Business Journals
Jane Meinhardt
The idea of nationalized electronic medical records has arisen in the wake of anthrax incidents and as a spinoff of new federal regulations regarding standardization of health care data.
So far, it is only an idea and far from realization.
"We may see a national medical database, but I'd say it's a long way away -- maybe even 50 years," said Dr. John Heilman, director of Florida's Pinellas County Health Department.
"I think the technical capability exists. Everything that would be needed to put it into practice is not there. Clearly, there are serious privacy issues."
No formal proposals to government entities or lobbying by medical organizations have been developed to promote the idea, said Trent Batchelor, spokesman for the Florida Medical Association.
The advantages of nationalized electronic medical records would include facilitation of epidemiological surveillance and investigation, which means public health agencies and medical organizations could better track disease outbreaks and respond to them.
The public health system gets disease information from a variety of sources such as laboratories, which are required to report certain ailments, as well as physicians. Reporting is done by telephone and in written form.
Some problems in reporting occur.
In the case of sexually transmitted diseases, more than half are never reported, Heilman said. Reporting is better when rare diseases are diagnosed or the symptoms develop, especially when there is a pattern.
"We would like to get data on a real-time basis," Heilman said.
"We're beefing up our infrastructure, but we're not there yet. Really, private practitioners are the eyes and ears for the public health system."
The basis for discussion about nationalized electronic medical records stems from regulations in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, also known as the Kennedy-Kassenbaum Act.
The goal of the law is to reduce health care fraud and abuse, guarantee privacy of health information and standardize health care information, applications and processes, including electronic formats.
The law aims to standardize: health care transactions such as claims; code sets relating to diseases, procedures, drugs and other information; identifiers for providers, patients and payers; benefit coordination; and privacy measures and electronic medical records.
Standards are being implemented in stages.
Health care organizations must be compliant with the transaction and code-set standards next October. Establishing standards, coupled with electronic processing, is expected to lower health care costs.
The Federal Register estimates that the standards and electronic processing could produce a savings of about $1.5 billion a year.
Jane Meinhardt is a reporter for The Business Journal in Tampa, Fla.