The core functional capabilities of the Health Information Environment are:

• Extensive Connectivity. Facilitates and permits the private and secure exchange of necessary health information among authorized clinical care providers, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, payers, and all other parties involved in the delivery and receipt of health care ­ including the patient and his or her caregiver or designated representative.
• Just In Time Access. Provides patients and their authorized health professionals or caregivers access to health information exactly when and how it is needed, in near real-time.
• Empowers Patients. Provides patients access to their own health information to enable them to work in partnership with providers to improve the quality and affordability of their health and health care.
• Enables Decision Support. Assists patients and professionals in making decisions and avoiding medical and medication errors; facilitates real-time prompts and reminders at the point of care and directly to the patient or caregiver; and enables broader use of evidence-based medicine.
• Assists in Quality Evaluation. Allows patients, purchasers, physicians, health systems and others to collect and use scientifically valid information to assess the quality of healthcare and make decisions about where and from whom to seek care. Use of quality information for public reporting should be demonstrated initially on a sub-network scale and should be done according to established guidelines for producing and aggregating measures of quality.
• Supports Ability to Protect and Maintain the Health of the Public. Enhances and facilitates the use of patient care data for appropriate public health disease surveillance, outbreak detection, trending, and health protection efforts, and ensures that public health results can be integrated to benefit patient diagnosis, care, and improve personal health decisions.
• Improves Research for Maintaining Health as well as the Diagnosis, Treatment and Cure of Disease. Enhances and facilitates the use of authorized patient care data in clinical research and ensures that clinical research results can be integrated to benefit patient care and improve personal health decisions. Provides a broadly enabling research infrastructure that promotes appropriate sharing and reusing of the results of clinical research to inform and improve care and facilitates collaborative research. The Health Information Environment should support use of authorized health and healthcare data collected in the course of routine medical care and from other sources to improve research capabilities, and for data collected in the course of research to improve health and healthcare.
• Enables Better Physician and Organizational Performance and Benchmarking. Enhances professionalism and the desire to "do the right thing" by creating the ability for physicians and other clinical care providers and organizations to more easily look at the aggregate processes and outcomes of care and benchmark their performance.