Major goals of health care in the 21st century are to make health care more efficient and less costly. These goals can be accomplished by implementation of evidence-based care; greater coordination of patient care; implementation of preventive care and wellness measures; and the evaluation of outcomes of care to identify improved ways to provide care. A universal patient medical record can help achieve these goals of more efficient and less costly health care.

This book describes how an automated patient medical record could be built that could evolve into a universal patient record. Such a universal patient record would change medical care from a focus on short-term care to one oriented to long-term, preventive-care. It would remove patient care from being the province of the single physician to that of the responsibility of many different healthcare providers, possibly located anywhere in the world.