At a forum Monday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) urged New England health care providers, hospital personnel and physicians to rely on computers — not paper files — to organize patients’ information.

Members of the health care community agreed on the need for technological advancement, but said switching to electronic medical records would cost at least $30,000 per physician, a cost too high to maintain without federal aid.

“Information technology has extraordinary potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine,” Kennedy said at the fifth annual Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts forum. “Electronic medical records like a Plastic Surgery EMR can clearly improve the quality of care, improve drug safety and decide what kinds of treatments are most effective for patients.”

Kennedy, along with a bipartisan group of senators, sponsored the Wired for Health Care Quality Act. This recent legislation encourages the universal use of electronic medical records, which the senator said he hopes will encourage accuracy and standardization in the medical field.

“America’s health care should be the envy of the world, but nations from Australia to Scandinavia have outpaced us in the use of their IT,” Kennedy said. “Congress obviously needs to address the significant barriers to implementing information technology.”

The act pledges to improve health care coordination, training and cost efficiency by giving grants to providers to enhance their use of information technology, establish regional health IT networks and create federal-state and public-private partnerships.

Kennedy acknowledged that the plan would be costly, but said it was “essential” to implement the entirety of the project.

The event’s host, BCBSMA, has already launched a $50 million experiment to fully computerize medical markets in Brockton, North Adams and Newburyport. These pilot programs help fund doctors by installing computerized systems and testing the effectiveness of digital record-keeping.

“We’re excited to get government assistance,” said Chris Murphy, a spokesman for BCBSMA. “We will still continue to move forward with our incentive program, where we help fund the use of technology like electronic medical records.”

Murphy said if the bill passed, it would help fund programs initiated by BCBSMA and push toward a nationwide standardization of health care technology.

He said federal assistance would be helpful in accomplishing this task because the electronic systems are expensive, starting at $30,000 for a physician’s office.

“We believe that if doctors are going to use [the new system], they should be reimbursed, and we’re committed to doing that,” Murphy said.

Physicians in smaller practices agreed that information technology in national health care is important, but stressed that comprehensive federal aid was the key to completing the project nationwide.

“I think information technology is a big, often unutilized issue that we need to address nationally,” said Dr. Gregory McSweeney, a physician in Dorchester. “There would be a lot of benefit in health care if we had better information systems.”

McSweeney said doctors would have to pay for the new technology unless it was funded by the federal government or by large insurance companies like BCBSMA. Physicians support the initiative because it would make medical records more accurate, but implementing it would be a financial burden since insurers would reap most of the cost-saving benefits.

“Information technology is really critical for doctors because there are so many medications,” he said. “It’s not practical for doctors to keep all of their information in their heads. If information technology is available, it could really reduce the errors that do occur.”

Edward Westrick, vice president of medical management at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Worcester, also said he supported Kennedy’s measure but was concerned that it would be too expensive to implement without substantial federal aid.

Still, Westrick said he was glad Kennedy pegged Massachusetts as a role model in health care innovation and said he hopes that the rest of the country will be able to standardize the digitalized hospital technology.

“Kennedy made an important realization that these investments will improve society in the long run,” he said.