Heidi Alexander: “I thank the Presiding Officer very much. I will complete my remarks. I see the Senator from Florida is here. Before I…”

“I thank the Presiding Officer very much. I will complete my remarks. I see the Senator from Florida is here. Before I yield the floor, I wish to make a brief statement about the legislation Senator Murray and I introduced. The electronic medical record system in this country is in a ditch. Doctors and hospitals that use it have come to dread it. The administration recognizes that there are problems. They haven't taken all of my advice about what to do about it, but I do give them credit. I thank Secretary Burwell, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, the National Coordinator for Health Information and Technology, and the head of CMS, Andy Slavitt, for working with our committee, Senator Murray and me, to try to find ways to make the electronic medical record system something that genuinely helps patients and that doctors look forward to instead of dreading. We have to do this because almost every advance we need to make in biomedical innovation depends upon this. Certainly the President's Precision Medicine Initiative absolutely depends upon our getting electronic medical records right. Perhaps the most important piece of legislation we approved today, among those seven pieces of legislation, was doing what we could do in legislation to get the electronic medical record system out of the ditch and onto a better track so that doctors use it rather than dread it. We are counting on the administration to continue to work with us to finish that job.…”