Being someone that works in health IT, things are going in the right direction, much to what this article says. There are certifications for the software that state to be certified, compatibility must be included in the software including HL7 (Standards for electronic interchange of clinical, financial, and administrative information among health care oriented computer systems) www.hl7.org. The main certification for the software is CCHIT www.cchit.org. Our clinic has been on an EHR (which is CCHIT certified) for over 4 years. It began as proprietary software, but now with a little help from the software vendor, works very well. I will agree most started out not wanting to share data, but that was only because sharing the data was not a thought back when EHR's were started. PS - Just my opinion, most are now called EHR, Electronic Health Records. :)

suprised have not seen this one yet, but brings new meaning to surfing the net. Maybe a little to obvious... (Goes to a corner to think about what he has done)