WASHINGTON – Senator Clinton teamed up yesterday with the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to tout new legislation that would speed the computerization of health records and make those records available at any hospital across the country at the click of a mouse.

The bipartisan pairing turned heads in Washington because both senators are considered likely candidates for the presidency in 2008.

Appearing side by side in network television interviews and at a hospital in the capital, the senators said adopting national standards for electronic health records would save lives by reducing medical errors, improving the quality of patient care, and reducing costs.

“Information technology has radically changed the way we do business, the way we shop, the way we live. It’s long past time that we use the power of the information age to improve health care,” Mrs. Clinton said. “What we want to do is have a set of standards that are the gold standard.”

Mrs. Clinton said a number of hospitals are adopting electronic charts for patients, but that incompatibility between the new systems is undermining efforts to build a national network.

“Right now, people are out in the marketplace selling systems, and they may or may not be good systems. But one thing we know for sure is that because there are many different vendors with many different systems, they cannot talk to each other,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It’s like everybody wants to go out and play baseball according to their own rules.”

Dr. Frist, who is a surgeon by training, said the paper medical records used by most hospitals and doctor’s offices are archaic. “We’re in the Stone Age. We’re not in the information age,” he said.

During a joint interview with Mrs. Clinton yesterday on NBC’s “Today,” Dr. Frist brushed aside a question about their respective presidential ambitions. “We’re both running. I’m running the Senate and she’s running for re-election,” he joked.

Last month, the same issue of electronic medical records prompted Mrs. Clinton to strike a similarly unusual bipartisan alliance with a former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, a Republican, was a staunch critic of the massive health-care reform proposal Mrs. Clinton put forward with her husband, President Clinton, in 1994. However, the former speaker found common ground with Mrs. Clinton after becoming an ardent supporter of increased automation in medical offices.

The new legislation, called the Health Technology To Enhance Quality Act of 2005, would allow the federal government to establish national technical standards for electronic medical records. In addition, the bill would authorize up to $125 million a year in grants for experiments aimed at improving information-sharing among medical providers.

In a conference call with reporters, Mrs. Clinton said she saw the bill as part of her earlier, unsuccessful effort to overhaul the health-care system. “I don’t see these as separate discussions. I see them as one overall discussion,” she said. Mrs. Clinton argued that computerizing records would save money that could, in turn, be directed to medical coverage for the uninsured.

However, the bill could stoke some of the same “Big Brother” fears raised by Mrs. Clinton’s earlier, bolder efforts on health care. The founder of a conservative health policy think tank warned yesterday that making medical records instantly available at millions of computer terminals in hospitals and doctor’s offices nationwide could exponentially increase the risk of unauthorized access to the most private personal data.

“That, combined with the lack of consent, is nothing but a recipe for greater privacy invasion and loss of control over who has access to your medical information,” said Sue Blevins of the Institute for Health Freedom.

Ms. Blevins said she is “not at all opposed to the technology,” but said individuals should be able to choose whether they want their medical records accessible to medical workers across the country. “The question is who wants to trade off privacy for efficiency, and I don’t think policy-makers can make these decisions for every citizen,” she said. Some people who are very ill might not object to having their entire medical record available on the Internet, Ms. Blevins added.

A professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia, Edward Shortliffe, said hospitals have already been wrestling with privacy issues, especially since federal medical privacy regulations went into effect in 2003. When President Clinton was recently in Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for heart surgery, Dr. Shortliffe said, special precautions limited access to his medical files. “It was not easy for anybody in that hospital to just look at William Clinton’s medical record. There were all kinds of criteria. It was need to know,” Dr. Shortliffe said.

Dr. Shortliffe said similar safeguards could be imposed on a nationwide system. Passwords or identification cards could be required, but an “override system” would be needed for emergencies involving unconscious or disoriented patients, the physician said.

Mrs. Clinton told reporters that privacy concerns would be at the forefront of the new standards. “The privacy experts, people who design and run the most, you know, highly classified military networks have to be at the table,” she said.

A summary of the bill distributed to reporters said the new electronic health record standards would be mandatory only for the public sector.

However, Mrs. Clinton said the new rules would be mandatory for virtually all doctors and hospitals. “If people want to participate in any federally funded programs, they will have to adopt those standards,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the American Hospital Association, Amy Lee, said the group supports the concept of greater computerization but has concerns about a one-size-fits-all approach. “The same platform or answer isn’t always better for everyone,” she said. “Communities are different.”

Dr. Shortliffe said most doctors are ready to embrace electronic medical records but have no financial motivation to do so. “I don’t think the average physician in practice right now has the incentive to make major investments in automation of his medical practice,” he said. “They see most of the benefits accruing to people other than them,” such as insurance companies and patients, he said.