As I mentioned, I think there are two scenarios.
One: the occasional patient is leaving town, or seeing a consultant. I want to make that transition as smooth as possible. I will be selective, probably do some capsule summary.
Two: 2,000 patients need their records. As nice a guy as I am, the provider who follows me is going to have to do some digging. I'd like to send what I have in a chronological order, and make sure everything is there, including notes from consultants, labs, etc., but I can't afford to edit and label everything. There needs to be a purple button in the menu someplace that says "dump everything to disk".
And Jon, you again point out my biggest rant about the EHR: the lack of a common data storage standard and inability to cleanly import records. If I had been emperor, I would not have dreamed up giving money to doctors who adopted a random program; instead, I would have taken all of that money, and given it to Google or Microsoft and told them to build the EHR equivalent of Word or Excel. Then I would have given it away for free, and simply said "if you want to get paid by Medicare, you have until January 2012 to put this in place."
