Today I went to see a very capable podiatrist who really had no idea that he had ever seen me before. His office has only paper records, ships them off-site after three years and gets rid of them after five, at least according to what they told me. So I whipped out my ancient, steam-powered Treo 650, performed a global search that took perhaps two seconds, and said: "February 20, 2003 at 2 pm." Voila, electronic medical records.
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Dan Akst is a journalist, essayist and novelist who wrote three books. His novel, The Webster Chronicle, is based on the lives of Cotton and Increase Mather.