And yes, I have two children myself, and have had that exact problem. My solution? I found a smaller doctor’s office, that didn’t have the crowds and giant, complex, legacy systems – and in fact we no longer have to fill out any paperwork whatsoever when we go their office, aside from getting a receipt back for the co-pay. My own doctor is part of a larger system, but even they have largely modernized, and have minimal paperwork. Vote with your dollars, and take your health business elsewhere, assuming you can, while the rest of this sorts itself out.

Larger systems have bigger problems, and workflow and imaging technology, on the old and low-end, have provided solutions to these problems for 10-20 years at least, and specifically came from a healthcare background, although typically on the insurance side. e-Forms have been around for an easy 10 years, and Carl’s point (correct me here Carl, if I’m twisting your message), and mine, is that without an appropriate ability to impose controls, you have no control, and that is not a good idea in a corporate/organizational setting.

What you’re describing on being able to share your health information directly, and personally, is more about who owns the records, and should you have portability and personal control in how that information is shared. That whole realm of problems is really hairy – and could be addressed with standards and solutions available now, but it’s a matter of getting enough of an ecosystem (government, insurance, hospitals, other providers) to be plugged into the supporting infrastructure to make it happen. Portability of healthcare isn’t just about the coverage, but the history, and making it all work for all participants.

As a side illustration – There was a terrible (or great, depending on how you look at it) Patrick Swayze movie called “Road House” (www.imdb.com/title/tt0098206/) that came out in 1989, with Patrick Swayze as a loner bouncer that went from town to town helping to clean up problem clientele. He traveled with his own copies of all of his medical records, x-rays, patient history, etc. in a big ol’ folder so his history could travel with him as he broke ribs, got stabbed, shot, etc. and make sure his “never the same twice” doctors knew his history.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived in a dozen states, and had many doctors, and so my medical history is scattered to the winds, and it might’ve been a good idea for me to keep copies of all of my records (if I could get them) to take with me. Too late. Jump to an electronic collection of this content/history, searchable/findable and crosslinkable to relevant drug, treatment, and predictive models, with appropriate controls, stored in a SaaS cloud that anyone from emergency responders to doctors, etc. can access with ease (or embedded/tagged in your body?), and voila, we’re in the 21st century.

You can bet though, that once your health information is fully centralized, the controls around that information had better be awfully good, or we are going to be in for an even worse run of Identity Theft than we’re already seeing.

It’s all possible now, and happening in fits and starts around the world, but as William Gibson said, “The Future is Already Here, it’s Just Unevenly Distributed.”

This is all fascinating stuff, and we need to have these discussions to think things through, or we’ll end up with new variations of smaller, lighter-weight, yet still bad/ill-conceived solutions. Upward, not backward, is my mission.

The first law of design…it depends.

I work with Carl, and we debate this all the time – I tend to be on the information wants to be free side, but let’s face it, intellectual property can neither be freely shared nor completely protected, and risk management is serious business. Would you like your healthcare practitioners blogging about their day, and whatever ailments you have, in a public or even semi-public setting? Blogs and Wikis aren’t for everything, and the point is to choose the appropriate tools, with guidance, and reasonable oversights, to keep this from becoming a BIG pile of smoking guns.

“Trust, but verify” sums it up nicely, rather than a 1984/Big Brother approach.

When was the last time you used bicycle technology to get to work? For all the reasons that it is a highly mis-matched technology in most cases (exceptions: gridlocked passages, 3rd world countries), business as usual is bicycle technology…you’ll be slow to the destination and risk getting run over.

Make no mistake, the darkness is all on the side of status quo. It’s caused by excessive use of ‘head in sand’ technique. Yearning for the good old days is not realistic, just as ‘control’ is no longer bounded by the walls of the organization.