This article really makes me wonder why doctors and hospitals haven't been all over digital archiving of their records. Keeping paper copies of all patient files is expensive and I have heard dozens of stories of friend's and family member's records being misplaced or lost. It's unacceptable in this age.
I know it's not quite as simple as running your records through a scanner and shoving them on a hard drive. There are questions of patient data security, backups and the possibility of malicious tampering— but all these issues exist with paper files, albeit as physical risks instead of digital risks. The time has come. I see absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be a way of providing patients with their records in an open standard file format that can be used by anything from a patient's iPhone to their PC or a specialized machine used to track a diabetic's glucose levels. Where are you ISA?
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The unfortunate thing is that most, of not all, of the potential privacy and security problems associated with digitising medical records have been addressed technologically with document signing systems, because their creators want people to actually use them in the real-world. There's a definite lack of understanding of signing in the wider world outside IT though which is obviously going to cause hold ups, but I think we're at the point where 95% of people who are hesitant about going digital could be convinced with hard facts that it's the way to go.
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