The video below was emailed to me by my mother. It offers up a vision of the health care industry being revolutionized by information technology. Hopefully that vision will be realized, but pardon me if I'm skeptical. As I told my mom in reply to her email, I can remember being a member of the Kaiser Permanente HMO in the DC area twenty years ago. They had an integrated computer network that allowed me or any member of my family to walk into any one of their centers and have our records accessed immediately by a doctor or nurse. No carting charts from one doctor to another! This, I thought, was the very near future of medicine. Twenty years later it still hasn't happened for the most part and I remain skeptical that the vested interests in health care will allow the changes needed to improve health care delivery in this country.

After watching this piece I truly hope I'm being overly pessimistic: