This is not an improvement that we will see in the matter of months, or probably even a few years. I suspect that we'll see very marginal incremental improvemen

This is not an improvement that we will see in the matter of months, or probably even a few years. I suspect that we'll see very marginal incremental improvements, followed by a large spike in productivity / efficiency. It would make sense that EMR's, like the Internet, and PC's before it, will be adopted collectively as a generation. I've personally been involved in a reasonably large deployment of a high-profile EMR system. In my case, we're talking about introducing networked software systems to an entire workforce. Doctors. Nurses. Residents. Receptionists. These aren't even people in the corporate business world, where computer / internet skills are considered vital skills. We're talking about starting from the ground up, "This is how you log into your computer". Even once they've been trained, it's not the same as having staff full of tech-savvy employees, who intuitively know how they can make software work for them. EMR's have a long way to go as well. many of the packages out pretty much just duplicate the functionality of paper records as pages of forms. The only difference is that the info is displayed it on a screen. Additionally, Presumably in an attempt to lock up a young market, there doesn't seem to be a lot of horizontal integration going on yet. This too will change, I think, as the market demands more as they become more widely adopted. On a side note, you have no idea how old-school many med-school programs are. I was really surprised at how much technical innovation there is in the engineering of medical devices, but not in medical practice.