House of Representatives set to vote today on 21st Century Cures bill

After 2 years of legislative wrangling, the House of Representatives is all ready to vote today on the 21^st Century Cures Act bill involving various health IT provisions created to deal the issues of electronic health record usability, interoperability, and data blocking.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate yesterday in advance of today’s House vote, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) applauded the legislation’s $6.3 billion in appropriations to support the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot ($1.8 billion), Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro technologies ($1.6 billion), and Precision Medicine Initiative ($1.4 billion). The bill finds to speed the approval of latest medicines and medical devices, among other provisions.

Alexander, chairman of the Senate health committee, also termed out the 21st Century Cures bill’s attempts to make better the health IT. Noting that the federal government has spent more than $30 billion on incentives to get providers to accept electronic health records (EHRs), he charged that EHR systems are a “mess” and desperately require fixing.

“Various portions of the bill concentrate on 2 critical areas where improvement is required to better leverage health IT and EHRs to their full potential,” claims Ben Moscovitch, manager of HIT at The Pew Charitable Trusts. “Those 2 areas are enhanced interoperability and improved usability and patient safety.”