Your Voice Your Vote 2024

Live results
Last Updated: April 23, 10:42:16PM ET

Senators Clinton and Frist Target Health Care

ByABC News via logo
June 16, 2005, 6:24 AM

June 16, 2005 — -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. are co-sponsoring legislation to create an "information technology infrastructure" that would centralize patient medical information and allow health care professionals to share that data.

The two lawmakers said the Health Technology to Enhance Quality Act would help fight preventable medical errors that kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people in hospitals each year by replacing current patient information systems with computer records.

"What we're trying to do is to help create a system so that we use information technology to create an electronic medical record that is transferable between your physician and the hospital if you're traveling, so that we have a national framework so that important information about your health can be readily available when it needs to be," Clinton told ABC News' "Good Morning America."

She said the legislation would aim to move the medical community away from a "Dark Ages" reliance on paper records.

The senators also said the system would lower costs.

The alliance is an unusual bipartisan effort for two of the Senate's most prominent members, who are both outspoken on health care issues. Frist is a surgeon, and Clinton led her husband's unsuccessful push for substantial health care overhaul in the early 1990s

"Together we're willing to wade into this," Clinton said.

Asked if a potential presidential race between the two senators in 2008 would seep into this bipartisan effort, the senators laughed.

"What we want to see happen is beyond politics," Clinton said.