Not sure about the skeuomorphism angle. I'm no UX specialist or anything but I would have thought the best practice would be to use 'standard' (well understood,

Not sure about the skeuomorphism angle. I'm no UX specialist or anything but I would have thought the best practice would be to use 'standard' (well understood, probably familiar for potential users already) UI elements which are an appropriate analogy for the use case. If you're flicking through paper, it might be easier to e.g. scroll through records for a specific patient and to have some kind of contextual search. But I think the obvious issue is really that they haven't validated and iterated on the design with actual users or even had somebody on the team responsible for caring about this stuff.