The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a signal achievement on the road to reform, which arguably began with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. That statute's Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provisions created an essential foundation for restructuring health care delivery and for achieving the ke...

BACKGROUND Improving health in our nation requires strengthening four major domains of the health care system: personal health management, health care delivery, public health, and health-related research. Many avoidable shortcomings in the health sector that result in poor quality are due to inaccessible data, information, and knowledge. A national health information infrastructure (NHII) offer...

It is absolutely essentially that the metaphors of use surrounding the NII and its component services be examined critically. We need to do this for two reasons. The descriptions and explanations of the NII and its component services will affect the societal debate around implementation and social impacts. Some of the metaphors used to describe the NII, however, distort the real effects and pos...