Lot of interesting comments about difficulty of IT integration. However, there is a much more fundamental problem with Healthcare IT. That has to with a lack of a functioning market. Thanks to HITECH subsidies, a bunch of money has flowed into EHR and related systems. It gives the impression of a customer paying for these systems, but once that fades a lot of these HIT companies are going to find that they are not in a market. People who think another 3-4 years will fix the issue are in denial.
Look, there are lot of industries that work in IT integration. If you take manufacturing, retail, finance, telecom etc. there hundreds of systems from the '60s and integration (and all the pain) is probably 80% of the work. 100's of billions of dollars are spent on IT integration. There is no magic 'one true IT system' but lot of hard work and slog. Nothing very special about healthcare. But, there is functioning market in these industries. Consumers of these systems have a very clear idea of how IT is going to help them run their business, it is sustaining system. They pay money, IT people build systems.
Not so in healthcare IT. Healthcare consists of bunch of fragmented and tiny providers interspersed with some large players. As such very few are managed as a business (as a retailer would for ex.), instead it is managed almost like a bazaar style haggling model. Try to squeeze out as much as possible from the insurance company, reduce the cycle time of payment, negotiate some extra tests, enter the correct ICD code etc. No standard business metrics that everyone can agree upon. If the value pitch is "we will help you get paid", then you have failed. My view is that this state of affairs will continue until there is some large scale integration and verticalization. Until we have these fragmented healthcare system in place I don't see a good future of healthcare IT.
I mean sure there will always be some people doing this, but people have working on healthcare IT since the '60s. Having super clean one true data model is fanciful at best but it actually will not solve anything. The $40 Billion of HITECH subsidies have managed to create a half assed EHR ecosystem with Epic taking a chunk of the market share. It will be interesting to see how the industry will manage to get the customers to pony up the next $40 Billion and the next and the next. In a fragmented system, the only IT system that can work is some sort of Slack type system (or communication tool) for patient/providers or between providers.