Medical life

"You must bring your medical documents with you to the consultation." - a Berkeley clinic's instructions to patients

Having spent the day corralling the various documents, I wondered why the clinic - and others like it - are running a decade or more behind in the way they transact business. If my design firm did things like this, we would cease to exist. I was told this evening that Kaiser does otherwise. If so, more power to them. Yet there's no reason why the clinics in a community like Berkeley couldn't organize themselves as a synthetic health-delivery organization, using off-the-shelf software and technology. All the doctors know each other, but the fax is as far as they go. It's amazing. It's also deplorable.