He has pledged to invest $10 billion a year over the next five years on the effort, but the cost for such a system could be closer to $100 billion over the next 10 years. The experts also note that sticking to his five-year timetable could prove to be daunting.
In 2004, Bush called for establishing EHRs for most Americans by 2014. Bush created the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology to lead the way. The ONC pushed several pilot projects and created standardized medical records. Even so, a survey of 2,700 U.S. doctors by the New England Journal of Medicine last July showed only 4% were using "fully functional" EHR systems; the rest are all still paper based.