[clueless123]

If the government has to get involved, it should be on helping (forcing) to define a flexible/complete vendor agnostic data interchange model that patients can carry along wherever they may go. The rest is just GUI, bells and whistles.

[nradov]

The Office of the National Coordinator has been helping on some aspects of that through support of the HL7 Consolidated CDA (C-CDA) initiative. So we do have a vendor agnostic data interchange format. But typically patient records are sent from one provider to another; there's still no good way for patients to "carry" their records.