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 medical practice, drug use, complication rates and health outcomes."

The article mentioned how after Hurricane Katrina, many veterans whose physical medical records were scattered to the winds were able to get their prescriptions thanks to electronically stored information.

Given the Bush administration's secrecy and surveillance on people's privacy, I can understand the qualms some people might have over a national health network. However, the article makes the far more compelling point that electronic records "could enable clinicians to reduce the level of preventable deaths by 50 percent by 2013."

That's because the variety of ways records are currently kept are so complicated that communication between doctors and patients can be tragically short-circuited. I think all of us on the administrative side of this question have experienced the problems which can arise when trying to coordinate care with another doctor's office.

My current place of employment is online and current, and I can speak from personal experience that it is the best way to deliver service to the patient. I think it's the way of the future. It's progress.

One of the practical benefits as far as I'm concerned is how it helps eliminate the possible problems caused by bad handwriting! We all know that doctors aren't the most graceful people in terms of penmanship, and I welcome a medical record that is neat and cleanly typed.

Now, electronic medical records can mean many things to many people. We use a system that takes our dictations and places them in an online medical records system. This way, the doctors never had to change anything about the way they did things, but from one day to the next we found we'd entered the digital age. The EMR was actually free, we only pay for the transcription. It has actually proven to be one of those rare experiences where the company under-promised and over-delivered.