Yesterdays San Diego Union Tribune had an article entitled: Digital divide. The subtitle is: Some doctors and hospitals are embracing electronic records for patients, but most are not making the technological leap from paper due to the cost.
It discusses Kaiser Permanentes' $4 billion roll out of their custom EMR system, called KP HealthConnect (the primary vendor is Epic Systems), to 8.7 million members in 9 states.
It also talks about the difficulties of EMR adoption in general -- cost being a major barrier. An interesting read.
UPDATE (9/10/08): Todays HIStalk Readers Write has a very good writeup about the rollout of this system in Northern California: A Physician’s Experience with Kaiser’s Epic/HealthConnect Rollout.