EHRs and information availability: are you at risk?

On April 27, 2004, the age of the electronic health records (EHR) in the United States took a major step forward. President Bush called for the creation, at the federal level, of a National Coordinator of Healthcare Information Technology within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Today, HHS has appointed the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) to coordinate the development of standards, and has awarded contracts to four companies to develop prototypes of a national health information network. The goal for these competing contracts is to see if by using standards-based architectures, information can be effectively shared across what, in essence, will be competing commercial solutions.