E-prescribing offers many well-known benefits to physicians, pharmacists and patients alike. Beyond the well-known patient benefits, real-time transactions with automated requests and responses promise to create efficiencies by speeding the medication ordering process, reducing or eliminating the back-and-forth communications between pharmacists and clinicians commonly associated with handwritten prescriptions.

Digitizing the medical records of 150 million patients means that nearly half of the entire population of the United States will have its records stored electronically next year. It's an ambitious goal, but more importantly, it's a major step toward the transformation of the healthcare system toward an electronic, digitized model.

A few weeks ago, we joined some 37,000 of our closest friends for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference. HIMSS is a cause-based, not-for-profit organization focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of health care.