108th Congress

Health Information for Quality Improvement Act

S. 2003

Background

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) introduced this multifaceted legislation to engage her colleagues and experts in a dialog on improving the overall quality of health care. She noted in her introductory remarks that she had introduced pieces of this legislation as amendments to other bills, such as S. 1, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-173), and S. 720, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2003. She expressed her interest in continuing to work with her colleagues to improve this legislation and address the fragmentation of the health care system.

Provisions of the Legislation/Impact on NIH

• The Secretary of Health and Human Services ( HHS) would have been required to establish an Office of National Healthcare Information Infrastructure, which would have provided ongoing national leadership in the planning, development, and adoption of a national health care information infrastructure.
• The Secretary of HHS would have been required to adopt a set of voluntary national data and communications standards to promote the interoperability of health care information technology systems across all public and private health care settings.
• The Secretary of HHS, in consultation with the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ( AHRQ) would have been required to award grants to hospitals and other health care providers to pay the costs of acquiring or implementing information technologies to improve quality of care and patient safety and reduce adverse events and health care complications resulting from medication errors.
• The Secretary of HHS, acting through AHRQ and in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would have been required to establish a Medical Systems Safety Initiative to conduct and support research regarding information technology and other systems-based approaches to improving and advancing medical care.
• Health insurers would have been prohibited from preventing individuals with serious illnesses from participating in approved clinical trials. (See page ___ for a more detailed description of this section.)
• The Director of AHRQ would have been required to award grants for primary care research on how to best care for patients 65 years of age and older with multiple chronic conditions.
• Similar to H.R. 2356, the Prescription Drug Comparative Effectiveness Act, NIH, in coordination with AHRQ and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would have been required to conduct methodologically sound research comparing prescription drugs that account for high levels of expenditures or use by individuals in federally funded health programs with other drugs and treatments used for the same disease or condition.
• AHRQ would have been required to develop or update health care quality indicators for 20 priority areas and support data collection and analysis to assess health care quality in communities and among people of different backgrounds.
• The Secretary of HHS would have been required to enter into a contract with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) or another appropriate entity to conduct a study on approaches to developing and disseminating practice guidelines.
• The Secretary of HHS would have been required to enter into a contract with IOM to evaluate options to align performance with payment, including payment under the Medicare program.
• The Secretary of HHS, acting through AHRQ, would have been required to support research and demonstration projects to assess the feasibility of using community-based and voluntary public and private organizations to disseminate information about health care quality to consumers.
• The Secretary of HHS, acting through AHRQ, would have been required to award grants to conduct research on patient experiences related to their health care.
• In addition, for the purposes of assisting eligible entities in providing quality assurance measures, the Secretary, acting through AHRQ, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the National Library of Medicine, and FDA would have been required to develop standardized materials that pharmacists could have used to assist non-English speaking or functionally illiterate patients in the safe and appropriate use of prescription drugs.

Status and Outlook

S. 2003 was introduced by Senator Clinton on December 9, 2003, and was referred to the Senate Committee on Finance. No further action occurred on this legislation during the 108th Congress.