Let's steer this topic a little bit, and let's commiserate on something we all need to think about, which is closely related to the OP.

Electronic Health Records. No matter what you think about health care and who/what should provide it, and no matter what plan or lack thereof you favor (and that's a TABOO topic here, BTW), there's a serious effort at pushing Electronic Health Records on to all of us. As a long-time geek, and a guy who sits in front of a computer 14 hours a day, I can say with a high degree of certainty that EHR's as they are being implemented are an extraordinarily bad thing. Heresy, I know, but that's how I see it. The entire EHR concept is roughly analogous to farm animal management software, in which, with point and click ease, you can record medications, inoculations and so forth for your cows, pigs, sheep, whatever. If you feel like a number now, EHR's literally reduce you to a record in a (proprietary) database.

And EHR's are fertile ground for marketing-based medicine. Using their decision-tree inputs for symptoms, the temptation for the software maker to "sell" a recommended treatment that pops onto the screen is very, very large.

In addition, the EHR systems as they stand completely leave out the patient. I was at a hospital for a broken wrist a couple of years ago, and they used EHR's and digital imaging. When I was looking on the screen at the X-Ray I asked the radiologist for a copy of the file...I handed them a USB key drive. He looked at me like I had handed him a steaming turd. "OK then, please email me the file." - again, stunned disbelief - "Oh, we can't do that..." - OK then, what CAN you give me - "We can print a film for you, but you'll have to pay for it yourself." - ummm....ok, well what's the big problem here, why am I excluded from the medical records? They are about me after all.

Even worse is that the systems I've seen and read about aren't compatible. If I ever move and my new doctors aren't on the same system as my current doctors, well then what? Print everything out? Who pays for that? Who re-keys? Do we really trust a data import scheme? What about data synchronization?

At this point, I generally carry a netbook with me everywhere and when I interact with ANY for-profit entity that could/will bill me, I log all of the communications and actions - and that includes medical professionals. I just have had too many bad experiences with their record-keeping motivations.