Senators Want to Speed Adoption of Electronic Health Records Systems

It could be years before patient health records flow seamlessly between hospitals, despite federal and state efforts to encourage information exchange. Lawmakers asked representatives from the private sector how they could speed up that process. During a hearing at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) asked witnesses what could be preventing hospitals and health care providers from adopting electronic health recorrds (EHR) systems. So far, he noted, about 48 percent of physicians and 59 percent of hospitals have at least a basic EHR system in place. (The Defense Department is currently reviewing bids for a potentially $11 billion, 10-year revamp of its own health records, with bids from tech companies including IBM and Epic, as well as Leidos and Accenture Federal.)

Sen Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) noted that many of the most expensive people in the healthcare system are cycling between nursing homes and hospitals. "If you don’t capture that, and if you don’t require the nursing home to meet the meaningful use standard or cooperate, then you’ve made a really stupid tactical error in the roll-out of health information technology," he said.