In July 1907, the first great breakthrough in medical IT took place at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.: the paper medical record, dropped into a paper folder and stored in a file cabinet. Until then, information on patients was kept in a ledger that recorded all of a day's patient visits, one after the other. Different departments kept separate ledgers, making it extremely difficult to track down patient information in a timely manner. But 106 years later, the paper record remains the state of the practice in medicine. In 2009, only 9 percent of America's hospitals were using even a basic form of electronic health records.
InfoWorld by Bill Snyder
Tags: electronic health records, Health IT, InfoWorld, Mayo Clinic Rochester, medical IT, medical record, paper medical record