Mark Roest did product development and marketing in the natural health industry for 14 years, from 1986 to 2000. For 4 of those years he was responsible for a natural health database, and working toward integration of health care models from around the world.

Mark sees the core elements of a national or global health information network as including:

- Universal patient records (in depth) (part of OpenVistA)

- Universal outcomes research based on the patient records (so far, has been implemented in VistA for a few specific outcomes for the population of one hospital or group of hospitals; presented in October)

- Protocols from both western and other health care systems, with any available outcomes information

- Bayesian logic applied to outcomes of clinical trials and other research sources

- measure the stated outcome - measure the credibility of the research

- The OpenVistA application packages

- Modeling of both western and other health care systems, with the models able to interact with the outcomes research

These elements can be used to reduce the cost of health care through both the efficiency of applying protocols, and the selection of the most appropriate protocols to apply in each case.