The Commission on Systemic Interoperability, established through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, also called for financial incentives for health care providers and the elimination of regulations that could slow the adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHR).

In total, the commission's report, which was released to the Senate and House of Representatives last week, spells out 14 recommendations that focus on three major areas: adoption issues, interoperability of health care data and secure connectivity between networks.

The report highlights the challenges involved in implementing a connected system of instantly accessible health records, said Robert Seliger, chair of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) steering committee on Integration and Interoperability. "In the last several years, there's been quite a movement in the health care industry to make patient information more easily available" to providers and to patients themselves, Seliger said.

But security and privacy concerns, cost issues and a relative lack of interoperability standards in the health care IT sector have proved to be major stumbling blocks, said Seliger, who is the CEO of Sentillion Inc., an Andover, Mass.-based vendor of identity management technologies.

The commission's recommendations are designed to overcome such issues, said commission Chairman Scott Wallace, who is also president of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology.