This story about the wonderful new personal health record available to the patients who frequent the  BJC system in in St.Louis explains about 90% of what’s wrong with American health care IT.

Peterson said myHealthFolders.com was developed internally, because BJC did not find all the features it wanted in any existing programs. He said three servers were purchased just for the project, and three staff members worked full time on it for 16 months.

Here’s a list of 45-odd personal health record products, and it doesn’t include some very well built products that didn’t survive the crash but are still perfectly decent software and could be bought for a song. Do they really mean that not one of them met the august standards of BJC? Or is it just possible that the "not-invented-here" syndrome is the reason why BJC is just getting its PHR out now when it could have bought one from a bankrupt (or even active) software company and shoved it out in 2001, and been four years ahead of itself. But who’d want to produce something good for the clients back then when they can wait patiently and have the perfect masterwork you produce yourself instead!

CODA: If you want to buy a great PHR product for a song, I can only remind you that it’s but an email away!