When I saw a presentation on the eCHN it was amazing how useful the users found the system. The topic of physician resistant keeps being brought up but is seems clear that physicians will use system that they find helpful.

The beginning of the article seemed to compare the lack of progress that Infoway has made with the rapid growth of the eCHN. The only things that I saw in the demo seemed to indicate that the eCHN was oriented around documents rather than discrete structured data. Moving and sharing documents is the easier way of doing things. There was a comment "We also needed to ensure that units of measure as well as nomenclature for diagnostic tests would be consistent and comparable." If the eCHN can provide structured and coded data this would increase the functionality even further by allowing the introduction of machine or computer based processing. This is the level that Infoway is working at. I think that eCHN has provided an application that users find very useful. Supplementing this with the foundation that Infoway is working on will allow eCHN to get to the next level through the availability of standard terminologies and messaging.