SPOTLIGHT: Is Obama's health IT plan flawed?

The Obama administration plans to spend billions of dollars to get hospitals to start using electronic medical records. But this plan to go digital, part of the health reform effort to reduce costs and improve care, may meet with resistance from hospitals that have not found such digital systems to be very useful. David Kibbe, a senior advisor to the American Academy of Family Physicians, said the "state of electronic health records available today is equivalent to the mainframe computer world in 1982. Imagine that the federal government had come in and said, 'We're not going to let DEC fail.'" He said the inadequacy of available commercial systems may be a big problem. Article