AMA to Senate: Pass Safety Bill

HDM Breaking News, June 16, 2004

Fifteen months after the U.S. House passed patient safety legislation, it is time for the Senate to do the same, according to the American Medical Association. The Chicago-based AMA is running a print advertisement in Roll Call, CongressDaily and National Journal in support of S. 720, reported from committee to the Senate floor last November. The House passed related legislation, H.R. 663, in March 2003.

Among other provisions, the Senate bill would authorize a network of patient safety databases to accept, aggregate and analyze nonidentifiable, voluntary reports from providers concerning medical errors or near-errors. The bill also would require the Department of Health and Human Services to develop within three years of enactment voluntary national standards that promote interoperability of health care information systems. Text of the Senate and House bills is available at the congressional Web site, thomas.loc.gov.

The AMA's House of Delegates also is calling on HHS to establish a comprehensive electronic registry of all clinical trials conducted in the United States. The association is concerned that pharmaceutical industry sponsorship of many clinical trials is creating a bias in research outcomes and whether the outcomes are published. The registry, the AMA believes, would ensure that clinical trials with negative as well as positive results are publicly available.

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