I am going to agree with JBS, this is more about the herd gathering together for mutual protection from an aggressor or to act proactively to head-off action from the government "we're here from the government to help you and we have devised the really spiffy clearinghouse you WILL use."
The one thing that you *can't* convince me of is that the primary motivation is patient care or better informing the clinician actually rendering treatment.
As I have been saying for four+ years now, AC does the most to improve it's long-term viability in the marketplace by making inter-operability with third-party solutions *The Priority* second only to charting encounters.
The user-base could have been saved a multi-year mis-adventure in the already crowded PM marketplace if AC had not been determined to re-invent the PM wheel.
I will acknowledge that developing for inter-operability can be significantly more challenging than stand-alone development, but the resultant work is more tested, more reliable, and more useful than stand-alone software.
This is far from a new or novel thought, it is rather a practical application of
Metcalfe's Law.
IMHO, now is the time for AC to focus on two things:
<1>Refine their core product - things like "The 81" and Orders in particular
<2>Become open to (and then proficient at) inter-operability so that other hardware and software can rapidly inter-operate with AC. This adds value to everyone; end-users, AC, and the third-parties.
