No One Has Access to All Patient Data

Health Information Technology (HIT) environments are a compilation of decisions made at different times, by different people, for different reasons. Some long-term, some short-term, some regulatory, some strategic, and some budgetary. 

Even as we have made strides to facilitate cooperation between EHRs, it’s become abundantly clear that there is a long and unclear road to go to achieve anything approaching complete and total interoperability. As the saying goes, “If you have seen/done one implementation of XYZ EHR, you understand one implementation of XYZ EHR”