REDUCING ADMINISTRATIVE HEALTH CARE COSTS.

SEC. 1909. REDUCING ADMINISTRATIVE HEALTH CARE COSTS. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, acting through the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research and, to the extent possible, in consultation with the Health Care Financing Administration, may fund research to develop a text-based standardized billing process, through the utilization of text-based information retrieval and natural language processing techniques applied to automatic coding and analysis of textual patient discharge summaries and other text-based electronic medical records, within a parallel general purpose (shared memory) high performance computing environment. The Secretary shall determine whether such a standardized approach to medical billing, through the utilization of the text-based hospital discharge summary as well as electronic patient records can reduce the administrative billing costs of health care delivery.