A bill sponsored by Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray aims to cut health care costs and would require a statewide transition to electronic medical record keeping and would ban pharmaceutical companies from giving gifts to doctors.

The Joint Committee on Health Care Financing heard testimony for the bill March 12, but has not yet acted on the legislation. An Act to Promote Cost Containment, Transparency and Efficiency in the Delivery of Quality Health Care would prohibit pharmaceutical agents from offering, and physicians from accepting, gifts of any kind, according to a press release from Murray’s office. However, it would still allow doctors to distribute drug samples to patients.

The bill provides for $25 million to be spent each year to facilitate a full transition to electronic record keeping by 2015.

There has been little State House opposition to the bill so far, said Shawn Collins, spokesman for Sen. Richard Moore, chairman of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, who endorsed the bill. However, they cannot predict if the bill will pass, he said.

Collins said though the measure asks for a lot of money up front, it will cut long-term costs like storage fees. Under Massachusetts law, doctors’ offices are required to keep medical records for up to 15 years, he said.

Electronic records are intended to cut costs, but they could also help to keep pharmaceutical companies from giving gifts and bribing doctors to prescribe certain drugs more often, Collins said, because the system could show the medicines doctors prescribe over time.

Richard Powers, spokesman for the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, said in an email that the Connector Authority supports the bill because it will help moderate the growing cost of medical care and improve patient safety.

“It is intended to reduce medical errors by having critical records available to all providers,” he said.

Massachusetts Medical Society President Dale Magee said $25 million annually would not be enough to pay for the changeover. The eHealth Collaborative spent $50 million wiring three Massachusetts communities and estimated the system going statewide would cost 20 times as much, he said.

Despite the installment cost, Magee said he thinks electronic record keeping is “inevitable” and necessary for better patient care. He said when primary care physicians send a patient to a specialist, the doctor is missing lab work one in seven times.

“Right now, information doesn’t move with the patient,” he said. “We’re taking care of patients without all the medical information that should be available.”

“I think there are a lot of expectations for electronic medical records. It’s certainly going to be a very important tool for medicine,” he said.

Magee doubts technology is not at the level for electronic records to be useful.

“The state of electronic records today is equivalent to the state of computers 20 years ago,” he said, adding that though he uses electronic records, he must use a fax machine to transfer files to colleagues using the same program.