Prescription Near For E-Health System? Yearlong Study Offers Hope It may be easier than once feared to mesh many types of electronic health records.(A)

Byline: DONNA HOWELL

A doctor in California can get lab results from a hospital in Indiana much easier than some government officials and tech and health care executives have feared.

That's a key conclusion of a yearlong test of a health network.

The project suggests that no nationally standardized electronic health records need be in place in order for health care workers nationwide to share patient data and improve care.

There's a government push to develop e-health records for most Americans by 2014, and meantime to develop a network for exchanging medical data. That's a time-consuming and costly proposition -- hundreds of millions of federal dollars are going to study and spur e-health.

These new findings are important because they show just how readily a useful network …