Does that move us any closer to a universal electronic Health Record (EHR)?
It may not. Within the healthcare information technology industry, primary and secondary EHR users and citizen/patients in general have not agreed on a definition for a universal EHR. Or, perhaps we are simply able to perceive many diverse functions from the conceptual EHR. In our recently published Standards Insight for April 2003, attached as an appendix, we examined the issue of definitions and functions. If, as we maintain, we do not know what the EHR/PMR and its system are to be in the United States, then will the impending recommendation be useful for this purpose? If your recommendation to HHS is to “encourage” adoption of a core terminology group and this encouragement is an essential and timely step in developing the EHR, then it eliminates alternatives and freezes technology, which quite frankly are in great flux as we begin to see the possibilities of the “semantic web”, distributed ontologies, and alternative structured documents. If, on the other hand, a recommendation to
