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I'm told by relatives that paper remains the easiest way to transfer medical records, either by courier or by fax, which are then scanned in. The move to electronic medical records has reduced the need to store paper records (which, interestingly, is expensive), but it hasn't done much to reduce the amount of paper consumed.

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It amazes me how little integration there is between medical systems, even now. I recently experienced being transferred into the local hospital's emergency department by ambulance, and while both ambulance and hospital had fully digital records, they had to manually copy everything off the ambulance's tablet screen into the hospital's system. And then at the end of the process a letter was printed to be sent to our doctor, and presumably entered into the database that they use.

I get that integration is hard, but the number of errors that must be introduced with so much transcription is ridiculous.

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