The NHIN offers such potential for improving public health services, galvanizing medical research and cutting costs that it has captured the imagination of the federal healthcare community. Under the auspices of the Office of the National Coordinator’s CONNECT gateway project, some 20 federal agencies have come together in the last two years to develop open-source “dial-tone” services for accessing the NHIN.

Agencies say the NHIN will help them improve the quality of care for every segment of the healthcare population: from the insured to the uninsured, from veterans to Native Americans, from public health providers to biomedical researchers.

We interviewed seven healthcare leaders about their vision for how federal agencies could best exploit the NHIN; what benefits full access to federal health information would bring to the public, and what barriers they foresee to federal healthcare transparency. Here are excerpts from what these experts had to say:

The Patient
A battle with life-threatening kidney cancer turned Dave deBronkart into an evangelist for electronic medical records. Blogging as e-Patient Dave, deBronkart espouses a future