That might sound like a trivial difference, but medical staff at US healthcare providers are required to record significantly more information in order for it to be reimbursed. For example in other countries you aren't recording supply usage on a "by patient" basis, but by ward or even by department.

So patient charts are much simpler abroad. So you could copy a foreign EHR system but it would be completely unusable or require so much alteration you might have well start again. The issues are somewhat systemic.

Even Medicare which is essentially socialized medicine in the US, has substantially higher documentation requirements than equivalent programs abroad.

The really useful low hanging fruit of EHR is an electronic portal for radiology results, blood results, discharge summaries and letters. If you have a way to link family doctor/pharmacy prescriptions with hospitals, thats great too.

My ideal health IT system assuming perfect AI and everything else would be:

- Automatic recording of everything discussed and done between nurses/doctors with no input from the doctor and producing a record which reads in a sensible way

- Automatic prompting for things the doctor/nurse was likely missed or should discuss during a consult (but only to a sensible level of detail)

- Automatic checking for common ommissions, or things that are being done that perhaps shouldn't be, so a patient who has a microcytic anaemia triggers a check to ask a doctor "do you want to order iron studies on this patient?"

edit: I should add that US budgeting funds for adding interoperability requirements sure does help.