Trotter promotes software called VistA (no relationship to the Microsoft OS) that was originally designed by Veterans Administration coders to improve care in hospitals once infamous for mistakes and mix-ups. They’ve since become some of the best in the country, in part because of VistA, which was designed collaboratively by the hospitals’ own coders rather than outside companies, said Trotter.

Commercial EHRs are “designed to get paid,” he said. “If you free yourself from that, which happens with the Kaiser and VA model, then you can do more things with EHRs.”

If you think about it, this is why the Internet flourished on open standards and open source. It wasn't IIS or even Netscape Server that exploded the internet. It was Apache. It wasn't PowerBuilder and Oracle. It was PERL and MySQL. Throwing GE or Allscripts as the "leaders" in this space is hazardous and ultimately a misappropriation of taxpayer money (like that hasn't already happened).