Our Future Will Be Paperless

I was overjoyed by a recent article describing how the Department of Veteran Affairs health system is now virtually paperless. An electronic patient database is something I've spoken of before, and I am always shocked when I hear of medical offices where computerization is not a fact of life. This technology saves lives: "Electronic medical records make confusing and physically unwieldy masses of data instantly available, portable and searchable -- altogether more useful than when the information was stored on paper. Computer-accessible records have the potential to save the cost-strangled American medical system billions of dollars in waste, repetition and error. They may also prove to be essential tools of research, allowing scientists to examine patterns of medica View the rest of this article