A U.S. senator said the private sector needs to develop national interoperable standards before physicians and hospitals will adopt electronic health records (EHRs).

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a practicing physician, said medical professionals won't adopt EHRs because the lack of interoperable standards makes the capital investment too high.

He said most physicians feel that way. "We've spent a quarter of a billion dollars in health [information technology], and nobody can tell me when we're getting interoperability," he said during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subcommittee hearing June 22.

Coburn, who heads the Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security Subcommittee, made the comments during his opening remarks before leaving to give a speech on the Senate floor.

The private sector should develop standards from the bottom up, he said. Adopting EHRs will improve health care and save time and lives, Coburn added.

A panel of experts from the departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, and Health and Human Services provided an update on their departments' initiatives in the health IT field.

For example, Carl Hendricks, chief information officer at DOD's Military Health System, said DOD's Clinical Data Repository and the VA's Health Data Repository will begin exchanging data next week on outpatient medication and medical allergies. That will enable health care workers at DOD and VA facilities to keep one another up-to-date on shared patients. The departments are testing the system at facilities in El Paso, Texas.

Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at the Government Accountability Office, said the VA's and DOD's demonstration projects to share health and lab data have resulted in lower costs and improved service. However, according to a GAO report, neither department has developed a clearly defined project management plan that includes technical and managerial processes.

Sarkar is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.