Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, said yesterday that health care in the 21st century “needs to be totally transformed.”

“You can’t reform the health-care system, its core underlying systems are wrong,” he said at a gathering of representatives of health-related organizations hosted by the New York Business Group on Health. Mr. Gingrich also gave an interview to The New York Sun.

The NYBGH is a not-for-profit organization devoted to employer health benefit issues. It functions as a forum for businesses to promote a value-based, market-driven health-care system.

Mr. Gingrich’s involvement in health care issues dates back to his years in Congress, where he co-chaired the Republican Task Force on Health for four years before becoming Speaker. He recently founded the Center for Health Transformation, which promotes a consumer-driven, information-based approach to health care, and he has just written a book, “Saving Lives and Saving Money: Transforming Healthcare in the 21st Century.”

Mr. Gingrich believes that there is no choice but to integrate the rapid technological advances now part of our daily lives into the health-care system. The rapid sharing of information is leading to an explosion of knowledge that can be used to advantage in health care with the help of technology. “Electronic records are the essential next ingredient to move health into the information age,” Mr. Gingrich told the Sun.

Mr. Gingrich, who says he spends 40% of his time on health issues and 40% on national security issues, has ideas that may be radical, but are eminently clear.

“Paper kills,” he said, meaning medical information on paper is usually not shared, to the detriment of the patient.

He believes that what is today a provider-centered system should use technology to become a system focused on, and tailored to, the individual. And he believes that a system that offers no incentives to the individual to be responsible is doomed to failure.

Mr. Gingrich acknowledges that health-care providers are resistant to change, but he cites the paradigm of the airlines that not so long ago faced a choice between adapting to changing circumstances or perishing.

“I see nothing in health we can’t solve,” he said. “It’ll just take a little while to talk it out among ourselves, and I fully expect, by the end of the decade, that we’ll have the highest-value health system in the world.”