Public Policy

Intel Public Policy: Health Information Technology
Personal Health & Health Information Technology
Intel seeks to drive public policies that speed the adoption of healthcare technologies to improve results for individuals and expand healthcare technology markets worldwide.
Background
Rapidly aging populations, chronic disease, poor healthcare quality, rising costs, and threats of pandemic contagions underscore the need to modernize our healthcare systems worldwide. However, many healthcare systems have been stubbornly resistant to the adoption of technologies that have already modernized other industry sectors. These inefficiencies, combined with dramatically increasing demand for healthcare, are directly threatening many nations’ abilities to maintain healthy, productive, and competitive societies. For example, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, D.C. reports that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die in hospitals each year as a result of preventable medical errors. Interoperable, standardized technologies within traditional points of care are critical to improving the quality and reducing the cost of healthcare.
Two factors impacting our world’s healthcare landscape are the growth of the over-60 population in developing countries from 42 million today to 278 million in 2050, and the spike in obesity rates which is producing an alarming growth in chronic disease. For example, in the U.S., nearly 20 percent of the population drives 80 percent of the healthcare spending and, of the 20 percent with chronic disease, many patients have multiple chronic conditions. The convergence of medical and consumer electronic technologies offers new possibilities for early detection of chronic disease and helping patients receive care through personal, adaptive home health systems. Daily interventions through such technologies help keep patients healthy, active, and at home—not in expensive acute and long-term care settings.
Key Issues
Reimbursement for home health technologies.
Intel supports policies that provide direct incentives to expand alternatives to traditional hospitals and other institutional care. For example, Intel supports efforts in the U.S. to expand the types of telehealth medical, surgical, and diagnostic codes reimbursed by Medicare, and innovative physician-directed chronic care teams focused on home health applications.

Read the full Intel Public Policy Health Information Technology Paper.