Newt Gingrich, the self-proclaimed “big ideas candidate,” still in the running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has a history with Healthcare IT News.
It goes back to November 2003, and the inaugural issue of MedTech Media’s flagship publication.
It was for that issue, and the subsequent January 2004 publication, that Gingrich wrote a two-part commentary on healthcare transformation and the role healthcare information technology might play. By then Gingrich’s role as architect of the Contract with America, and his stint as Speaker of the House were more than five years past.
He had since turned his attention to a number of policy issues, and healthcare seemed to be No. 1. He founded the Center for Health Transformation in 2003, which recently has come under fire for bringing in millions in membership fees from entities such as AHIP and the American Hospital Association.
The exclusive two-part Gingrich commentary published in Healthcare IT News was adapted from a talk he gave at The Emerging Technologies & Healthcare Innovations Congress.
“There remains a very real and large gap between what is possible in healthcare and the actual state of healthcare,” Gingrich wrote. He advocated for electronic prescribing and for technologies that would establish system-wide efficiencies. He asserted that healthcare – over the next 15 to 20 years – would break “toward a transformed, more personally responsible, incentive-led, and information-rich system, or it is going to break toward a government controlled, bureaucratic, expensive system that rations care.”
“Technology can help insure that it doesn’t move toward the latter,” he wrote.
In the second part of the commentary, Gingrich took on medical errors.
“The entire tenor of the healthcare debate will change as the average American learns how dangerous hospitals are,” he predicted. “Statistically, the chances of dying in a hospital due to a medial error are 2,000 times more likely than dying on a commercial airliner, or 200,000 percent more likely.”
via Newt Gingrich on health IT: Then, now and the time between | Government Health IT.