AS WE SEE IT, the real scandal in connection with eHealth Ontario has little to do with the $1 billion the Auditor General says has been wasted by it and its predecessor over the past decade. Rather, it concerns their very existence.

Without a doubt, the agencies were involved in a terribly important area, trying to bring health records into the age of the Internet.

But the task is one that should be undertaken nationally or internationally, not provincially.

The importance of electronics as a communications tool has long since been established, with real property offering an excellent example of what can be accomplished.

For many years, Ontario lawyers haven't had to go to land registry offices and pore over huge books full of handwritten entries in an effort to determine whether a property can be bought or sold without risk of someone asserting a lien.

And newspapers have come a long way from the days when reporters hand-wrote their stories, editors handwrote the editing and typesetters set the type by hand or on a linotype.

In fact, a 1,000-word story that once would have taken an hour to write and more hours to set into type can today be written in minutes, placed on an electronic page in an instant and the page itself sent to the printer in very few minutes. A community newspaper that once required a staff of 10 to put out an eight-page weekly will today expect half that many to produce a paper the size of this week's issue.

Yet the sad truth of the matter is that at least some doctors still make handwritten entries in their patients' files, and while some local doctors and modern hospitals like the Headwaters Health Care Centre have electronic filing, we still have a long way to go before a Dufferin resident who falls ill in the Maritimes or Florida will be able to go to a local doctor and have him or her call up their vital health information from a website containing the files of all Ontario residents, let alone of all 300-million-plus North Americans.

Wikpedia defines the electronic health record as "an evolving concept defined as a longitudinal collection of electronic health information about individual patients or populations. It is a record in digital format that is capable of being shared across different health care settings, by being embedded in a network-connected, enterprise-wide information system. Such records may included a whole range of data in comprehensive or summary form, including demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, billing information."

The purpose is to establish a complete record of patient encounters that automates and streamlines workflow in health care settings and increases safety through evidence-based decision-making, quality management, and legible reporting of outcomes.

U.S. President Barack Obama has made electronic health records a major element of his proposals for health care reform, and it's about the only proposal he has made that has not yet been assailed by his conservative critics.

However, we haven't yet seen how the President hopes to accomplish the feat of having all U.S. doctors and hospitals keep records (past, present and future) in a compatible format that can be made instantly accessible during a health emergency.

As for Canada, Alberta appears to be the only province that's close to having comprehensive electronic health records, and after a decade of two Ontario agencies looking at the challenge there's considerable doubt the province will have the e-records by 2015. All we've seen done to date is a pilot project in which Collingwood is one of two communities where all health records are being made electronic. As for progress elsewhere in the province, our suspicion is that the recent scandal about wasteful spending of taxpayers' dollars and the widespread use of untendered contracts has done little more than eliminate what little progress was being made.

Clearly, the need now is to have the federal government take a leading role, in the context of its responsibilities in the area of interprovincial trade and commerce, in developing a single system for electronic collection and storage of all Canadians' health records.

Our preference would be to see the Harper government form a task force containing representatives of the provinces, medical professions and hospitals with a mandate to recommend creation of a federal-provincial agency responsible for collecting and storing electronic health records, all of which would be compiled using compatible forms of software.

Ideally, the Canadian task force would work closely with the Obama administration to ensure full compatibility between the two countries' health-care databases.

The objective would be to have all current patient assessments and treatments done electronically by 2012, with historic records being converted to electronic formats within the next three years, whatever the cost.

With the proper commitment, the savings in both costs and lives would be enormous.