Release 0.0: Clinical information technology in the real world.

The industrialization of medical care delivery, compelled by fifteen years of reimbursement reform, has given rise to a commercial health information technology (HIT) industry. Well financed by Wail Street, the HIT industry offers a variety of ready-made solutions designed to transform a health care organization's raw data resources into useful clinical information. Many of the. resulting clinical decision-support products are encumbered by numerous insurmountable intellectual and technical problems and, as a consequence, meet with cultural resistance from physicians. The long-awaited but costly implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs) will make these pioneering but flawed efforts obsolete, if EMR development successfully exploits recent technological breakthroughs and the ongoing consolidation of health care organizations.