Many vendors and organizations are creating systems that enable patients and providers to communicate. Such systems will enable, for example, a physician to share a plan of care with a patient, a patient to request an appointment, or request a renewal to a medication. These systems will save the physician and their staff valuable time and improve the quality of patient care. This situation is reminiscent of the state of e-mail technologies before the Internet revolution. E-mail systems that did not embrace standards were unable to send messages to each other, or required gateways that often devalued both the sending and receiving systems.
Many patients have more than one physician and patients change physicians on average once per year.
If patients must use different systems to communicate with different providers, and perhaps only see a portion of their relevant health data at any one time, this will discourage the use of electronic communication. Physicians using a particular system would not be able to communicate with all of their patients. Physicians would also be locked into a specific system in order to maintain communication with the patients that use that system. Such 'closed environments' would restrict freedom of choice and would stifle innovative development from vendors. Providers and patients are ill-served by such a lack of standards.