Colorado is racing a five-year deadline to build a network of electronic medical records linking doctors' offices and hospitals across the state — a massive challenge given that about 70 percent of physicians still use the print-fax-phone method to share data.In 2015, the federal government will begin penalizing doctors who aren't using electronic records by reducing their reimbursements for treating patients with Medicare or Medicaid.By then, Colorado's health-information-technology experts — who have been working on a centralized network since the mid-1990s — plan to have a system that will allow a doctor to electronically zip a patient's medical history to a hospital, nursing home or home-health nurse.

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