Getting hospitals, doctors and clinics to the point where they can easily share electronic patient records remains an elusive goal in the ongoing effort to bring the health-care profession into the digital age, a study released Thursday says. The report from the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, or WEDI, says in a 122-page report that achieving some sort of standard that allows a doctor in New York to retrieve patient records from a hospital in California during a medical emergency is essential if the nation's multibillion-dollar effort to bring health-care online will be successful.
