Editor's Letter: 10 Years And 6 Czars Into HIT, Where Are We Now?

It has been almost a decade since President George W. Bush launched the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and since that time hordes of pilots, projects, grants, initiatives, federal advisory committees and regulations have been launched or established.

In those ten years alone, adoption of health IT has gone from mostly uninterested or hesitant adopters to a thriving, nearly-unanimous vision for digitizing the U.S. healthcare system.

Both the Bush and Obama Administrations retained similar visions particular to health IT against the backdrop of partisan hostility over healthcare in general. And we are nearing the final year for Bush’s goal: to have electronic health records for every American by the end of 2014.

Bluntly, that’s a long shot today.