For years, universally accessible health records have been a major goal of health care professionals and technology entities alike, and their benefits are well documented.

Such a system would enable medical staff at a large hospital to see the same information about a patient, at once and without the possibility of misinterpretation; the ability of a specialist to see precisely what a primary care physician sees; and critically, the capacity of the patient to access his or her medical records easily and in a format that is readily understood by a layperson.Unfortunately, this ideal has only seen limited success in the real world. According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), “The benefits of electronic health records (EHRs) are well documented, yet their introduction has been greeted with reluctance and sometimes resistance. Indeed, current usage rates are quite low.”…