I worked for HIS - Hospital Information Systems - for a couple of decades and lean toward agreement with what Stop-truth-decay says above. I have been away now for some few years and don't know the current state of such systems.

When I left the HIS industry did not have enough geeks. Users were clinging to the old technology. Fighting upgrades, new technologies, standards for exchange of information.

This week Lowe's and Walmart did a better job of handling our transactions than did the medical facilities visited separately by my spouse and myself for routine matters. I've no clue as to a solution but as Stop-truth-decay states I would conjecture that EMRs are a mess.

Getting large areas of services to upgrade seems to be a mess too. Homeland Security, FEMA, the City of San Francisco and airline luggage handlers are examples of recent messes that have made the news. I cannot imagine how one would upgrade EMRs without killing a whole bunch of people.