I thought the whole idea was to allow sharing of patient data between units - how is that going to work if everyone buys their own system?

e.g. my son has an eye infection at the moment and we've been round 4 different places - GP clinic, optometrist, hospital, eye hospital over the last week. The process of getting the appointments was great (the time from asking for an appointment to the actual appointment time) has never been less than 2 hours - but this caused a problem in that the systems couldn't keep up.