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The August 2010 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly is titled: “Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch.” http://goo.gl/cpqN  Six of the trends are related to EMRs and EHRs. I have retained the original item numbers in the following list:

Making the network the organization: The traditional silos of most large organizations limit the ability of the organization to take advantage of distributed knowledge. Internal networks facilitate time and knowledge sharing based, “… on the orchestration of tasks rather than the ‘ownership’ of workers.” EMRs provide one of a number of organizational networks that can facilitate task based knowledge transfer.

Collaboration at scale: Networks facilitate collaboration but don’t necessarily foster it. Management and organizational learning is required to realize large scale collaboration. “The next leap forward in the productivity of knowledge workers will come from interactive technologies combined with complementary investment in process innovations and training. Strategic choices, such as whether to extend collaboration networks to customer and suppliers, will be important.” Suppliers of medical services are already part of EMRs to the extent their services and test results are included.