Building a mammoth federal EHR: Tech is the easy part

The joint electronic health record (EHR) that the Department of Defense and VA are creating is not the first open source project a federal health agency has undertaken -- but it is the largest and arguably most important.

Consider the scope. According to VA CIO Roger Baker, "The key phrase is single common electronic health system. It's two large systems, and... the intention is to get to a point where there is a single repository for all the data related to an individual' s medical record whether generated in DoD or VA, and I might add through the nationwide health information network."...