Message From the Editor: Electronic Medical Records: Does it Take a Village or a Thousand Points of Light?

Everyone agrees that the current state of US health care information technology is unsatisfactory. Despite the enormous investment in health care in the US – two trillion dollars annually, equivalent to 15% of the GDP – transportability of medical information is chaotic, medical errors are unacceptably high, and deviations from evidence-based practice standards are endemic. Only 2% of the health care budget is currently thought to be consumed by information technology (IT) related activities. Fewer than one-quarter of physicians in the US utilize some form of an electronic medical record (EMR), and many of these are rudimentary. These numbers are much lower than in Europe and other developed nations; in some, the use of EMRs approaches 100%. In the UK, a single EMR for its 60 million citizens is under construction by the National Health Service. Many feel that the mediocre outcomes registered by the US health care system, compared with those of other nations with much smaller per capita health care budgets, can be traced directly to an inadequate IT infrastructure…