Health Secretary Nominee Can Rely On Tech-Friendly Rep

Some who know Mike Leavitt well expect that the former Utah governor will be a strong new advocate of President Bush's goal to get America's health-care system wired.

Bush nominated Leavitt this week as secretary of health and human services to replace Tommy Thompson, who announced his plans to resign from the post a few weeks ago. For the last year, Leavitt had been head of the Environmental Protection Agency; prior to that, he had been elected governor of Utah three times, serving 11 years.

"No governor got technology more than Mike Leavitt," says Utah's CIO W. Val Oveson, who in a number of positions had worked with Leavitt for 12 years before Leavitt joined the EPA. "Mike is IT-savvy and will make an incredible secretary [in part] for that reason," Oveson says.

During Leavitt's tenure as governor of Utah, the state built a Web portal supporting more than 200 services, including drivers' license renewals and other transactions for citizens. The state also began building the Utah Health Information Network, which started as a clearinghouse for electronic payments by insurers to health-care providers, Oveson says. That network will be expanded over the next several years to support transactions with pharmacies and possibly electronic health records, he says.

In addition to that, Utah launched an electronic system to support human-services programs, including case-management processes related to Utah's Medicaid operations. "Mike understands the power of these kinds of networks," Oveson says. "A whole new paradigm in the delivery of human services started under his watch" as governor.

Observers say that kind of tech-savvy background will be beneficial in Leavitt's new role. President Bush earlier this year set out the goal for most Americans to have electronic health records by 2014. The sharing of patients' digitized clinical information can potentially eliminate tens of thousands of medical errors and billions of dollars in costs annually, according to government researchers.

To help promote that goal, Bush ordered the creation of a new post, National Health IT Coordinator, a job held by physician and former CEO Dr. David Brailer. Brailer will report to Leavitt if Leavitt's nomination is approved by the Senate.

Brailer's current boss, outgoing health secretary Thompson, also had been a vocal advocate of health IT. However, some observers say Thompson may have dropped the ball recently during Congress' fiscal 2005 appropriation process. Despite strong bipartisan support from members of Congress this year for the plan to wire the nation's health-care system, Congress failed to approve $50 million that had been requested by Brailer's office to seed health-IT interoperability and standards projects.

Lewis Redd, national leader of Capgemini's health practice, predicts that Bush "will take a lot of heat" for the failure to secure seed money for the Brailer projects, particularly because Bush made electronic health records a pre-election topic, as well as promoted health-care technology to the nation in his State of the Union address last January.

Redd suspects that Thompson didn't push members of Congress hard enough for the funding because he knew he was going to step down. Redd also suspects that the national deficit and wartime spending made it easy for Congress to delay the E-health funding, "since that's a decade-long journey," referring to Bush's 10-year goal for most Americans to have electronic health records. Says Redd, "It's easy to say, 'let's wait a year.' "

Brailer has said publicly that he hopes his office will still be able to secure $50 million for the seed projects in fiscal 2005 through the $60 billion pool of discretionary funds set aside in Health and Human Service's $500 billion budget.

If Oveson is correct about Leavitt's strong support for technology initiatives, then that should be easy money for Brailer after all.