The US government is poised to spend billions on electronic records to help streamline health care delivery. But, after complaints that companies put all the blame of computer errors on hospitals and physicians, one rabble-rousing lawmaker is questioning the technology's efficacy.

Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wrote to 31 hospitals across the country in January to investigate their experiences with health information technology, such as systems that allow physicians to enter prescriptions into a computer instead of hand-writing them. The correspondence comes only months after Grassley sent letters in October to ten companies—including medical equipment giants 3M and Philips Healthcare—inquiring about liability limitations in their contracts associated with health technology.

According to Thomas Yackel, an internist at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, most contracts between health care providers and makers of e-health software include wording that could be paraphrased as 'use this system on real patients at your own risk'. “Most of these contracts look like the vendors are washing their hands of any responsibility, but, to be a good vendor, you can't do that or no one works with you,” says Yackel, who studies errors in health care informatics.

Tech companies echo at least some of Yackel's assessment. “In order to have a cooperative and successful relationship, we do not—and, in general, vendors should not—always put all responsibility for errors on the customer,” says Irfan Iqbal, director of medical informatics at Sequel Systems, a medical software company in Melville, New York.