Agency aligns hospital record systems

If someone shows up in a Denver emergency room on Wednesday, a lot of time and money could be saved if doctors knew she’d had lab work done in Boulder the week before.

With immediate access to those lab results, the doctors could launch into a course of treatment that could be more efficient, as well as more effective for the patient.

This hypothetical scenario is one of the drivers behind a national movement toward making health records electronically accessible to all health-care providers.

Whereas the benefits of having such a system in place include…