In a rousing and impassioned speech, ONC's chief said that America is halfway through digitizing healthcare and five percent of the way through transforming workflows to take advantage of the infrastructure. Achieving that will require new roles of the entire care team.

With digitization and interconnected devices come HIPAA compliance costs and a web of security issues. Organizations should thus be devoting extra scrutiny to vendors and designing security architectures from the get-go, one cyber-security analyst suggests.