Not long ago, I postulated about the idea of giving Don Berwick the $100M the federal government has set aside for healthcare IT to develop an open source enterprise EMR system.

It seems that CMS is going down that road with this $100,000 grant to the AAFP… although I can’t imagine that $100K will get them far at all (perhaps a requirements document?). Ideally, a project like this should be a public /private partnership: the government has money, trade organizations (are supposed to) understand the needs of healthcare workers (the "voice of the customer") and healthcare IT vendors / consulting firms (are supposed to) know how to develop and deploy scalable, reliable software/web-based applications.