Prescription: Networking

Boston Medical Center is one of a relative few of U.S. hospitals that have managed to break down bureaucratic barriers to exchange electronic medical records with community health centers having different owners—a first step toward statewide and nationwide exchanges to improve health-care quality and reduce waste. Meg Aranow, the hospital’s chief information officer, and Andrew Ulrich, an emergency department physician, describe the rationale for and emerging uses of this electronic-records network now serving many of Boston’s inner-city patients.