Tech signs health initiative

Tech was host to an influential crowd Feb. 12 that included Governor Sonny Perdue, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt as they signed an initiative to promote transparency in health care. Francois Sainfort, director of the Health Systems Institute (HSI) and associate dean of the College of Engineering, signed it on behalf of Tech, while the governor signed on behalf of the state government.

In addition to the aforementioned guests, representatives from many Georgia companies, among them AT&T, Aetna, the Coca-Cola Company, Piedmont Health Care, UPS and WellStar Health System, also were on hand to pledge their support, as well as organizations including the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, the Georgia Hospital Association, the Georgia Medical Care Foundation, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

Nationwide, hundreds of companies have signed their support but Tech has been one of only a handful of academic institutions to do the same.

"People don't normally think of Tech as a major reformer of health care. This raises awareness of what we are trying to do here and helps put Tech on the map," Sainfort said. He has been director of the HSI since it was established in 2005 by the Department of Biomedical Engineering, a partnership between Tech and Emory University.

The health reform initiative outlines, in what it calls cornerstones, the goals it is trying to reach. The signatories commit to supporting these goals when it comes to the services such as health insurance and health care that they contract with third parties to provide.

The first of these cornerstones is the improvement of information technology systems used in providing patient care, with a focus on interoperability to facilitate communication between providers.

The second cornerstone is to ensure patients have access to accurate information regarding the quality of health care that is available to them. This is done by consistent measurement and reporting of the quality of health care providers according to standards established by national organizations such as the National Quality Forum and the Hospital Quality Alliance.

Related to the second cornerstone, the third is to ensure patients also have accurate information regarding the pricing of health care. This information is to be combined whenever possible with the information on quality to ensure that consumers can make informed value-based decisions.

Also, strategies for measuring the overall cost of common treatment plans should be established to improve the ability of consumers to be able to estimate the cost of the treatment they will receive.

"People value health so we're willing to pay for health care. Spending a lot of money is not a problem in itself; the problem is not spending it intelligently and wasting money," Sainfort said.

The fourth cornerstone is a commitment to improve the quality of health care available while making it as cost effective as possible. This should be done by developing new approaches that reward those who purchase and those who provide efficient health care service that is high in quality while being priced competitively.

"It's a good initiative, and now the issue is to figure out how to implement it," Sainfort said.

Secretary Leavitt has been busy touring the country for the past several months promoting the initiative, making stops to over a dozen states where leading area employers have signed on. This month, in addition his visit to Tech, Leavitt has been to similar meetings in New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Vermont, and New Hampshire.