Where do we stand in the maze of health information systems?

This issue of JAMIA focuses on the opportunities and challenges for implementing and evaluating practical systems to handle health information for a variety of end users, including patients. Early on, electronic systems usually consisted of simple electronic health records (EHRs) with the purpose of providing clinicians with efficient access to patient information during the encounter. As our field evolved, selecting, implementing, and evaluating these systems became very complex, as EHR systems have increasingly added (a) EHR-based clinical data warehouses to support quality improvement and research, (b) clinical decision support (CDS) features, and (c) programming interfaces to support health information exchange (HIE) across different systems. As the informatics community takes important steps toward developing systematic frameworks to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of these different system features, JAMIA presents studies and perspectives that document the current state of development in health information systems. Two randomized controlled …