Most large healthcare provider organizations already provide patients with online access to their records. Patients can download or print those records, but the problem is that it's still tough to integrate records from multiple different provider organizations in a clinically useful way.

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) solve the problem to some extent by importing data from multiple provider organizations and synthesizing a single longitudinal record for every patient. But not every provider is part of an HIE, and no HIE really covers the whole country.