Background: Federal Government Initiatives

In recognition of the fact that across the board standardization of electronic health records in the United States is going to be a long time in coming, the federal government actually did make an effort to fund projects involving personal, portable health records.

The legislation was part of bill S. 1418, the "Wired for Health Care Quality Act" of November 2005, and was originally sponsored by Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming. Thirty eight other senators supported the bill, which would have provided roughly $130 million dollars per year for between two and four years. Some of that money was supposed to be put towards projects aimed at providing patients with individual records they could keep or carry with them. (Official text of bill on this government website: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.01418. Layperson's explanation of the bill in this article: http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,1892672,00.asp)

As I understand it, the money was supposed to be distrubuted through states and given as grants to hospitals, physician practices, medical schools, and other entities willing to start projects filling this objective. Sounds like a great idea, right?

Yes it did. In conducting my own research, I was excited to hear about this legislation and to find out exactly what had come of it. Unfortunately, it appears that not much has actually happened and not much may ever happen. After calling Senator Enzi's office, and then being referred to a committee staffer, and then making many phone calls to legislative staffers within the state of Pennsylvania, what I gathered was that the bill stalled out somewhere in the House approval process. As far as reasoning, the best I could get was "You know, with the war and everything, there's not much cash to fund this stuff."

Kind of disappointing, but perhaps not an absolute dead end. As of this writing, I am continuing to attempt to ascertain the status of this legislation, and will provide an update here if I find anything.