On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that the “failed promise” of the $28 billion EHR program may stand in the way of a precision medicine initiative until physicians are able to use systems that communicate with one another. The statement was made during the committee’s innovation initiative to examine how we get safe drugs, devices, and treatments from the discovery process through the regulatory process into the medicine cabinets and doctors’ offices more quickly and cheaply.
The promise of precision medicine is one key part of the innovation effort discussed in Tuesday’s hearing. “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”, Alexander said.
He added, “Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has told us that a properly functioning records system is essential both to help assemble the genomes of one million individuals and for doctors to be able to use a patient’s genetic information when they write a prescription for individual patients”.
