LANSING — Legislation to overhaul how health care providers share patient data is expected to be sent to the full House later this year, with supporters claiming it will save lives and reduce unnecessary clinic trips.

Bills brought to the Committee on Health Policy by Reps. Julie Rogers, D-Kalamazoo, and Curtis VanderWall, R-Ludington, would allow a nonprofit Health Information Exchange to serve as a statewide Health Data Utility and earmark Medicaid funds to pay for it.

The goal is to ensure providers receive as much information from each other as possible about their mutual patients, advocates say.

A Health Information Exchange is a system that acts as a “bridge” for patients’s medical information among health care providers.

When a patient goes from one provider to another, data like allergies, medications and test results are often communicated through a Health Information Exchange.

But care in specialized settings like schools, ambulances, rehab clinics and foster care facilities is often left out of the exchange, said Michigan State Medical Society representative Kevin Bohnsack, a family physician in Milan.

That can lead to scenarios where life-saving patient data is lost in what Bohnsack called a “dropped baton.”

Dropped batons may lead to medical testing may be repeated unnecessarily or patients without transportation having appointments scheduled miles away, he said.

In some cases, consequences can be fatal. Rogers told a personal story during her testimony about a relative who was transferred from an assisted living facility to a hospital after he developed pneumonia.

The assisted living facility failed to include the patient’s Parkinson’s medication in its exchange report to the hospital, Rogers said, leading to a week where he remained immobile and bedridden.

“After he was transferred back to his assisted living facility, we received a frantic call from his wife,” she said. “He had acquired multiple severe bed sores and deep pressure wounds.”

A Health Data Utility acts as a secure, standardized center for all patient data, Rogers said.

Such a system would ensure that medical facilities have a patient’s full medical history when they provide care, Rogers and Bohnsack said. Patients could opt-in to the system with any Michigan provider, and opt-out at any time.

The legislation mandates that the system would give all providers full access to relevant parts of their patients’ medical histories and statewide public health data.

If the legislation passes, the selected Health Information Exchange would be the Michigan Health Information Network, which has routed over a billion messages from nearly all hospitals in the state.

Similar legislation passed the House but died in a Senate committee in December.

A handful of legislators voted against the bills last year, citing concerns over patient data security, Rogers said. No opposition was voiced at the committee hearing.

In 2024, 180 million patients across the country had their health care data encrypted and compromised in the largest cyberattack in U.S. history.

The attack affected Change Healthcare, the patient data and transaction manager for insurers including United Healthcare.

It prevented patients from having their insurance pay for medications, and the outage severely damaged health providers’ revenue streams.

The new bills would strengthen required data security standards, Rogers said.

During committee testimony, Michigan Health Information Network representative Isabell Pacheco said the network’s system has “rigorous” security measures, employees undergo annual cybersecurity training and data is encrypted in transit.

“We have no history of data breaches, and we take security seriously because patient trust is nonnegotiable,” Pacheco said.

The legislation has 29 co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle, including Reps. Steve Frisbie, R-Pennfield Twp., David Prestin, R-Cedar River, Ken Borton, R-Gaylord, and Brenda Carter, D-Pontiac.