Political Equinox

Nearly one hundred years ago in 1914, Congress created the Legislative Reference Service  to provide “nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues.”

In 2003, we taxpayers paid more than $86 million dollars to provide this service to our representatives and senators. If we’re going to pay that much for people to write summaries of legislation I think the public has a right for easy access to this information.

The Problem

A 2003 CRS internal memo states three areas of concern:

• Impairment of Member Communication with Constituents – So instead of recieving a form letter from my congressman telling me in their biased opinion how they plan to vote on the issue I could read an unbiased summary? Sign me up! I wouldn’t contact my representative ask them to explain me a legislative issue anyway, I’d probably look it up on the Internet.
• Risk to Protection of Confidentiality – Easy way to solve this, any documents that contain confidential information would not be published. Honestly, I’m not really sure how much this would affect the overall process. I don’t see this as a huge concern.
• Change in Mission and Congressional Focus – This issue is a joke. If someone hired to write summaries for congressman can’t do that because they know the public will read the document as well shouldn’t be working in the office. The intended audience of all documents should remain the congressional offices, the public would just have access. What’s the worst case scenario? Do academic journals lower their writing standards just because I might happen to see a copy on the internet? Absolutely not! You write for your audience and don’t let third party factors influence your writing.

Apparently, many of our congressmen and senators didn’t even read the stimulus bill. If they aren’t going to use the resources available at least let us have an opportunity to do so. Even if we can’t completely understand all the text in the CRS summaries, they’d certainly be more useful than the bill itself.

Today, I’ve been offered a position in the Republican National Committee’s Eisenhower Internship Program. The program runs from May 26th to August 7th, and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity.

Please allow me to make this the unoffical Request for Proposal of the people of the United States in the area of a standardized format for heathcare information exchange.

The current landscape is a bunch of different electronic health record providers storing data in propritary formats, which don’t allow for potability of data at all.

A Massive Database

The most effective and efficient way of doing things would be a massive, centralized helthcare information database compliging healthcare data on every patient in the United States. However, this masive database brings several concerns in the playing field.

• Privacy - All of this highly confidential data stored in one location could be a breeding ground for trouble if someone received unauthorized access to the system.
• Control – We’d have to decide who would actually control, store, and pay for this data. Would it be our government?
• Logistics/Stability – storing all healthcare information in one location would create a massive database of information that may be prone to failures at key times; however, this is true of any systems.

This database would allow every doctor, nurse to instantly access a patients information no matter where they are in America. This would allow a patient to retrive information on any patient, whether they had been seeing that doctor for 20 years or were in an emergency room for the first time in a city while vacationing.

System Audit Trails would be put in place to ensure workers were only accessing the profiles of workers they were authorized to access.

A Portable Health Format

Because a massive database of patient healthcare information probably isn’t in our direct future because of the privacy, control, and logistical concerns we need to focus on developing a standardized format of exchaning healthcare information between different providers and their unqiue software systems.

While some hospitals are reaching our to groups of physicians to form a vertically integrated medical group to ensure portability of patient information (and customers, of course), our healthcare system needs a standard where a doctor can export a pateitns pertinant information and send it to a specialist, hospital, or other doctor.

This portable format would be somewhat like a PDF of your health history and while it wouldn’t be continually updated across all of your medical care, you could at least transfer some of the information.

Creating a portable healthcare exchange format is necessary step to get everyone on the same page in order to even think about moving to a centralized healthcare information exchange.

Even in this economy, blogs are being re-designed (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the most overused phrase in journalism.)

I hope you like my second attempt at Political Equinox - it’s certainly brighter. Our website is approaching just about a year and a half of operation and unless you are really quick or still have an old copy of the website on your computer you’ll be seeing Version 2.

The redesign is largely white and minimalist because we wanted the focus to be on the content we will be producing over the coming weeks. I believe I can speak for both Patrick and myself in saying we’ve been a bit lax about ensuring that content appears on Political Equinox frequently. However we’re committed to making this venture a successful one and we hope that you will stay along for the ride.

We’re going to aim for 2-3 posts a week with more depth, links to additional resources, videos & diagrams, and maybe even a few interviews. There are lots of new ideas flowing around and I’m glad I’m able to put the stamp on this design and get back to writing.

Launching in 3…2…1….

In the coming weeks you’ll see the face of Political Equinox change as the website is redesigned and then relaunched with a strict editorial schedule that ensures fresh content continually making its way to our readers.

You may not see a post until that redesign…forgive our silence.