Dover, DE – Senate Bill 238, which establishes the Delaware Health Care Claims Database within the Delaware Health Information Network, passed the Senate unanimously on June 9th, and passed the House unanimously earlier this evening.
“Today, the General Assembly passed legislation that represents a critical step in Delaware’s health care innovation efforts,” Governor Markell said. “I greatly appreciate the leadership of Senator Bethany Hall-Long and Representative Melanie George Smith in sponsoring this important health care transparency legislation, which has been in progress for several years. I also would like to thank the Delaware Center for Health Innovation and all of the health care community stakeholders who worked with us on this consensus legislation.”
“This legislation creates much-needed transparency around health care costs, and moves Delaware toward a more efficient health care delivery system that emphasizes quality care and places a greater value on patient outcomes,” Sen. Bethany Hall-Long said.
“The creation of a Health Care Claims Database will be an important asset to State policy-makers and other stakeholders who are working on public policy solutions to rising health care prices without sacrificing the quality and availability of care to Delawareans,” said Rep. Melanie George Smith, who has confronted rising health care costs in her role as Co-Chair of the General Assembly’s Joint Finance Committee.
Governor Markell discussed the need for a health care claims database in his 2012 State of the State Address, where he noted that “[a] next step to leverage technology is to create a claims and cost database. Business leaders have come to understand the key to improving performance is harnessing the capacity of information technology to aggregate and analyze data. This database will allow us to figure out why some providers get better results and why some providers create more costs without better results to show for it. We will be in a position to reward what works and change what doesn’t.”
The Health Care Claims Database will be administered under the authority of the DHIN’s board of directors, whose membership reflects a cross-section of stakeholders from the health care industry, state government, and members of the public and health care consumers. The DHIN currently holds clinical data from all of Delaware’s major hospitals and providers, and this legislation allows the DHIN to also maintain pricing data. The legislation requires that the information be maintained in a secure, encrypted setting in compliance with all federal and state health care privacy and data security laws.