Do You See Your Health IT Platform Becoming an Open Ecosystem?

Many CIOs are supportive of the public API approach and are starting to see their health system IT environment as more of an open ecosystem that could take advantage of web services and less of a walled garden where they own and control everything.

There seems to be agreement that a data-centric rather than a document-centric approach to interoperability is the way forward. But no one really knows what is going to happen when the technological capabilities of open application programming interfaces (APIs) and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) profiles run up against the business models of EHR vendors and health systems. Who will want to share patient data with startups developing apps that may threaten to make obsolete part of their EHR system?