At Sun, 9 Feb 2003 11:46:09 -0800 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I can turn around and integrate that with the interface the other >physicians offices and the local pharmacies in town give me, which is >still in this day and age, sadly, the FAX machine. That is the real world.
Quite so. If you are really serious about devising an electronic health record then it will have to have the capability of reproducing facsimiles of paper documents for some time to come. Although we *might* succeed in making say, pharmacy and physician computer systems interoperable in the medium term--say the next 5-10 years--there will still be paper communications from patients to consider for much longer yet. Technically ugly as it is, Moore's law has ensured that at least we have plenty of storage and processing power to render images of paper, leaving two main considerations to be solved: efficient workflow for scanning and indexing images, and efficient user interfaces for retrieving it. A snappy riff through a stack of paper is still hard to beat for speed. D. -- Douglas Carnall +44 (0) 207 241 1255 +44 (0) 7900 212 881 http://carnall.org
