We live with a health care system that has evolved into an increasingly fragmented, primarily treatment-oriented, and now heavily burdened environment.  More importantly, issues related to privacy, space, and disease transmissibility have limited access to non-medical personnel who might offer creative, evidence-based, radical change to the health care system, as proposed years ago by the National Research Council.  One way to reimagine that access is through the use of multimodal digital data that summarize patient encounters and make them amenable to outside observers. This talk with summarize the rationale for this project and offer a framework for thinking through how the OBSERVER project could be realized.