U. S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Michael Leavitt held an open forum with UW faculty, staff, students, and visitors, Wednesday, April 20, in the UW’s Hogness Auditorium. About 200 people attended the forum.
Leavitt, who assumed his present post Jan. 26, was in Seattle to visit the Region X office of HHS, as part of a plan to visit all 10 regional offices early in his term. During these visits, he also seeks opportunities to talk with local health-sciences students and health professionals.
The American government’s largest civilian department, Health and Human Services is in a federal system that encompasses the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies.
At the UW, Leavitt gave his observations on the health-care environment, opened the floor to questions, then ended with a call for students to debate Social Security reform.
Health-care financing, Leavitt said, is dominating the discussion in the nation’s boardrooms, as well as on the floors of state legislatures. In some places Medicaid payments exceed 20 percent of a state’s budget, or surpass the state’s education allocation, Leavitt noted.
“We’re at a point where problems in the U.S. health-care system are big enough to see, yet still small enough to solve,” Leavitt said. He said a chief contributor to U.S. health-care problems, particularly record-keeping inefficiencies and lag time in detecting safety concerns, was the lack of uniform standards for health information technology.
Leavitt suggested a collaborative approach to standard setting by providers, vendors, and academic health-care centers. He noted that such collaboration will be messy, time-consuming, frustrating, but in the end, indispensable.
“The health IT standards won’t be prescribed,” Leavitt said, “but the feds will employ them and people who want to do business with the feds will employ them.” He believes uniform standards will end the uncertainty that is preventing payors and other groups from investing in information technology.
Leavitt is a former Republican governor of Utah and the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before entering government service, he studied economics and business at Southern Utah University and went on to become president and chief executive officer of an insurance brokerage firm.