Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has been busy, and remains so. Earlier this month, he announced that he would conduct a series of hearings intended to solve problems with the federal government’s six-year-old, $30 billion program meant to encourage adoption of electronic health records at medical offices and hospitals.

Stepping back a bit to December 2014, he said he was interested in looking at when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) claimed that a quarter of a million physicians had not been able to comply with the program’s second phase and have begun losing 1 percent of their Medicare payments. The final rule for the next stage is expected by early fall.

"To put it bluntly, physicians and doctors have said to me that they are literally 'terrified' on the next implementation stage of electronic health records, called meaningful use Stage 3, because of its complexity and because of the fines that will be levied," Alexander said.

"My goal is that before that phase is implemented, we can work with physicians and hospitals and the administration to get the system back on track and make it a tool that hospitals and physicians can look forward to using to help their patients instead of something they dread."

This month, he said in prepared remarks before the Senate, "There is a great deal of bipartisan interest in this on the committee. My staff and [Washington] Senator Murray’s staff have been meeting with experts every day, the staff of each of our committee members have been meeting once a week, and Senator Murray and myself have been speaking with the administration regularly as well."

"Here’s what we’re talking about:

The meaningful use program began in 2009 to encourage the 491,000 physicians who serve Medicaid and Medicare patients and almost 4,500 hospitals who serve those patients to begin to adopt and use electronic health records systems.

Of those 491,000 physicians, 456,000 have received some sort of Medicare or Medicaid incentive payment from the meaningful use program. All hospitals and most physicians that tried were able to meet the first stage requirements. For those who met the requirements, the government paid incentive payments in the form of higher Medicare reimbursements. It has so far paid out $30 billion in incentive payments.

But the program’s Stage 2 requirements are so complex that only about 11 percent of eligible physicians have been able to comply so far, and just about 42 percent of eligible hospitals have been able to comply.

The next step in the program is penalties for doctors and hospitals that don’t comply. This year, 257,000 physicians have already begun losing 1 percent of their Medicare reimbursements and 200 hospitals may be losing even more than that."

Alexander said he’d like to identify five or six steps medical professionals can take to improve electronic health records; the series will mark the start of a series of hearings to address various possible solutions.

"Electronic health records can help to assemble and understand the genomes of the one million individuals. And, second, if we want to make genetic information useful, being able to exchange information will help doctors when they write a prescription for you," Alexander said in a statement.

The program has increased adoption. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, since 2009, the percentage of physicians with a basic electronic health record system has grown from 22 percent to 48 percent. And the percentage of hospitals with a basic records system has grown from 12 percent to 59 percent, but Alexander claims the program hasn’t done enough to make the systems easy to use or interoperable or really achieved much beyond adoption.

According to a Medical Economics survey, nearly 70 percent of physicians say their electronic health record systems have not been worth it. Alexander even goes so far as to cite columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote: "The EHR technology, being in its infancy, is hopelessly inefficient. Hospital physicians will tell you endless tales about the wastefulness of the data collection and how the lack of interoperability defeats the very purpose of data sharing."

"Patients will receive better care if we can improve the exchange of information so that a patient’s health record can be accessed by physicians and pharmacists in an efficient and reliable way, the term industry experts use for this exchange of information is interoperability," Alexander said.

Alexander and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently announced the start of a series of bipartisan hearings on possible solutions to achieve the promise of health IT. They announced a full, bipartisan, full committee staff working group to help identify ways that Congress and the administration can work together to improve health IT for doctors, hospitals, and their patients back in April.

"If we want to continue improving the quality and value of health care patients and families receive, we absolutely need to strengthen our nation’s health IT infrastructure," said Murray. "I'm pleased that the committee shares this bipartisan priority and I look forward to working together on ways to empower patients and providers with more effective, efficient electronic health records."

The pair will focus on opportunities to improve physician experience with health IT. They also announced that the following hearing in the series will focus on how to make sure patients can better access their own health information.