Blackburn: Regulatory environment should not discourage innovation

The intersection of healthcare and technology is upon us, and “it’s a very exciting time, an incredible time,” said Martha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, speaking at the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Health Innovation Initiative policy forum on Dec. 3.

Blackburn reflected on the past 20 years, which witnessed breakthroughs in mapping the human genome, the curing of some types of childhood leukemia, the onset of the World Wide Web, the spread of email communication and the advent of smartphones more functional than PCs from the 1990s.

But “while technology advances are exciting, our nation also faces some significant medical challenges,” she said. About $8,000 per person was spent on healthcare last year, and nationwide 79 million adults have obesity, 29 million have diabetes and five million have Alzheimer’s.

“You think about these numbers and what we’re up against in addressing not only healthcare delivery but the consumption of healthcare. We must put technology to work to solve these problems and we must do that now,” she said.

Technology tools equip people with the ability to take responsibility for their own health, she said. The app space meanwhile is booming. There are 100,000 mobile medical apps, and consumers have paid to download 300,000 of them. These apps give consumers the ability to track their health and become better educated in the process.

“The opportunity to solve the greatest challenges is really unprecedented. We need to attract smart and talented innovators to solve healthcare challenges,” Blackburn said. To get there, legislators need to provide a regulatory environment that is simple and avoid regulatory duplication.

“Without such a regulatory environment, we run a risk that bright minds innovating will work on developing other types of technology or they’ll want to do the next Candy Crush Sage instead of focusing on healthcare,” she said. “We must enable 21^st century technology get into the hands of 21^st century physicians for their 21^st century patients to solve 21^st century problems. That’s what the House Commerce & Energy Committee is working on.”

Part of that entails providing a clear statutory definitions for new healthcare technologies. Legislation to be introduced in early January will include the following components to move this vision forward: a risk-based regulatory framework for health IT, which includes the deregulation of health IT that has no risks, proper FDA oversight of technologies in the category of highest risk to patient safety and a risk-based framework for all other health IT.

“We look forward to having that on the president’s desk in early 2015,” she said.