Creating an infrastructure for the productive sharing of clinical information.

The need for a patient-centered approach to health care services delivery is well recognized. Health care has become more specialized, with increasing numbers of disciplines and subdisciplines. In addition, both providers and community are increasingly mobile. As a consequence, patients see more providers, which has led to increasing fragmentation of patient-centered care and in particular of patients' personal health records. Clinicians and patients alike recognize the need to ensure that care information is patient-centered, continuous, and integrated in order to optimize the effectiveness of proactive and reactive care. Current arrangements, however, including the architecture of medical record and information management systems, are mainly provider- and service-centered and may not readily support the sharing of data to this end.