After three days of absorbing remarkably rich content at the Medical Group Management Association annual meeting, I humbly offer the following profile of a group practice well-situated for the future:

Demanding patients, whom neither HHS regulates nor physicians control, to use portals and simultaneously holding the threat of failing meaningful use tests over the heads of physicians for not succeeding as social networkers is not only bad policy; it is also amazingly unintelligent and high-handed.

One patient can have multiple identifiers within a single organization, e.g. medical record number, billing/patient account number, order number, requisition number, etc. More identifiers come into play when hospitals have multiple locations offering different types of services.

Health care comparative effectiveness research could be the catalyst for monumental change, according to Deloitte's Rajiv Sabharwal.

As a 45-year resident of Michigan and former state political reporter, I remember Republican U.S. House Reps. Dave Camp and Fred Upton when they were young, bright, informed legislators who worked across party lines, found compromise, and actually governed.

As more systems are interfaced, significantly higher volumes of data are flowing into patient records and other clinical, administrative and financial systems. An error at any point along the way--an incorrect birth date, transposed digit in a Social Security number, missed middle initial or misspelled name--quickly snowballs.