Dana I hear where you are coming from, but you are wrong. At this point PHRs are nice-to-haves. And the CTN doesn't need tight EMR integration to be successful. Don't blame CTN for not being able to leverage open EMRs or regional Health Information Exchanges - they still don't exist!
How about this...via CTN the primary physician in a rural setting now has live video access to specialists to confer with on complex cases. The primary physician can share his desktop on which he can view any image, lab, note that he has in his system. Via live video a remote specialist now has instant access to the latest information without worrying about the EMR system at all. The only time data needs to be input into another system is when the patient is referred to see the specialist in person. By empowering the point of attack doctor with first; access to expertise and over time the expertise itself, the rate of transfer will be greatly diminished with the bonus of better outcomes (see Project Echo).
Ok, let's take this one step farther. The next step in health care is home care. Let's see... who might just have a HIPAA compliant broadband backbone spanning the state of California that could possibly handle linking local municipal area networks together to provide such access? CTN! failure? - I think not...
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