ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS: A FLOP. “Dr. Peter Sutherland, a family physician in Tennessee, made the shift to computerized patient records from paper in the last few years. There are benefits to using electronic health records, Dr. Sutherland says, but grappling with the software and new reporting requirements has slowed him down. He sees fewer patients, and his income has slipped. . . . Since the financial crisis, the Obama administration has moved aggressively to push medicine into the digital age. As part of the economic recovery package, Congress enacted the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009. The legislation provided for federal incentive payments of $44,000 a physician to shift to electronic health records.”

Electronic records are also easier to hack.