Earlier this month, National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo told senators that health IT is "foundational" to President Barack Obama's Precision Medicine initiative and discussed ways to improve data sharing. According to Health Data Management in February, Obama asked Congress for $215 million in funding for a personalized medicine initiative that centers around the creation of a massive database containing the genetic data of at least 1 million volunteer participants.

During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, DeSalvo said the "comprehensive data picture" formed by analytics, electronic health records, mobile health device information and other data "is necessary to identify the right prevention and treatment that is not only the most effective, but also most desired by the patient."

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) added that the current state of EHRs frustrates providers and could inhibit such research.

"We've got to get to a place where the systems can talk to one another ... and also where more doctors, particularly the smaller physicians' offices, want to adopt these systems, can afford the cost and can be confident that their investment will be of value," he said.

Alexander has been pressing hard against supposed inefficiencies of EHRs. In April, he and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) of the Senate health committee announced a bipartisan, full-committee working group to identify additional ways to encourage the improvement of the technology.

"After $28 billion in taxpayer dollars spent subsidizing electronic health records, ‎doctors don't like these electronic medical record systems and say they disrupt workflow, interrupt the doctor-patient relationship and haven’t been worth the effort," said Alexander. "The goal of this working group is to identify the five or six things we can do to help make the failed promise of electronic health records something that physicians and providers look forward to instead of something they endure."

"As we focus on making our healthcare system work better for families, electronic health records could not be more important," Murray said. "Having more and better information can make all the difference for patients, so I look forward to working with chairman Alexander and members of our Committee to strengthen our nation’s health IT infrastructure and improve quality of care and patient safety in Washington state and across the country."

According to a statement released by the committee, the workgroup aims to help identify ways that Congress and the administration can work together to:

• help doctors and hospitals improve quality of care and patient safety
• facilitate information exchange between different electronic record vendors and different health professionals, referred to as "interoperability"
• empower patients to engage in their own healthcare through convenient, user-friendly access to their personal health information
• leverage health information technology capabilities to improve patient safety
• protect patient privacy and security of health information

On May 5, Alexander released a statement titled, "Failing Electronic Health Records Program May Stand in Way of Precision Medicine," in which he provided support of his work with Murray. His comments included:

Very often in health care, innovation initially increases our costs. That does not mean we should not innovate – in this industry, innovation means lives saved, diseases cured, or mobility restored. Innovative new products can increase initial health care costs, but in the long-term could actually decrease health care costs as we make strides in medicine.

Also, if you look at a disease like Alzheimer’s, which according to the Alzheimer’s Association will cost us $226 billion dollars this year along with other dementias, and if we could use precision medicine to delay onset or cure that disease, we could save precious dollars in our health care system while preventing or alleviating some of the grief and pain associated with this awful disease for patients and their families.

But it is an important thing to be mindful of.

This committee has also been spending time looking at how to improve electronic health records.

The federal government has spent $28 billion to drive the adoption of these records systems, and the result is that doctors don’t like the systems, they say they disrupt workflow, interrupt the doctor-patient relationship, and haven’t been worth the effort.

So, Senator Murray and I have begun a working group to identify the five or six things we can do to help make the failed promise of electronic health records something that physicians and providers look forward to instead of something they endure.

We’ve got to get these records to a place where the systems can talk to one another – that’s called interoperability – and also where more doctors, particularly the smaller physicians’ offices, want to adopt these systems, can afford the cost, and can be confident that their investment will be of value.