I take my hat off to what Drchrono is doing in the space. They are moving the discussion forward. It's a fact, Dr's love the iPad. They want more medical and he

I take my hat off to what Drchrono is doing in the space. They are moving the discussion forward. It's a fact, Dr's love the iPad. They want more medical and healthcare related apps on the iPad. Drchrono's platform is a big win. Nevertheless, getting one doctor or a small office of doctors to use an EMR/EHR is one thing, getting an institution to use a system is quite another. I work for such an institution and have built solutions that are in production now. Believe me, it is an incredibly difficult, time consuming, error prone and expensive proposition. Where government intervention could really shine is in offering incentives for interoperation by way of public API publication. As a developer in this space in an institutional setting, I can tell you from years of experience that an institution of any meaningful size is going to have many, many electronic system repositories of varying depth and breadth. The problem from my vantage point is that it is nearly impossible to get these systems to talk to each other to do necessary data exchange. Multiple systems that refuse to interoperate will become a major stumbling block in the short to mid term. Eventually this will all shake itself out but I would rather that be sooner than later and government policy can do a lot to make this whole endeavor work better. As it stands, virtually every single provider is entirely focused on "owning" the entire pie. What they should be focusing on is making their applications "team players" that are able to integrate into a suite of legacy applications. Not doing so is a major mistake because, as we know, there is no single tool that is right for every job. The healthcare field is so varied and so fractured from a specialists perspective that you need specific solutions for specific situations. I am absolutely in favor of using as many tools as necessary as long as there is some mechanism for information exchange. I think the ability to exchange data will be the critical differentiator of the next generation of healthcare applications.