electronic medical records (EHRs)

The world of paper medical records has almost disappeared, ushering in a new era of electronically stored, analyzed, and shared medical information that offers exciting opportunities for improved patient care. However, this major shift in information management has introduced unintended and unfavorable consequences, such as theft of patient-protected health information, wide-scale sequestering of medical records by ransomware (malicious software—malware—that permanently blocks the access to records unless a ransom is paid), and the ability for hackers to directly harm patients...

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There was this moment, about 50 minutes into our interview with President Barack Obama last week, that genuinely surprised me (and surprised other health care journalists, like David Nather, too). My colleague Ezra Klein had asked the president a question about which part of the law had overperformed his expectations, and which part of the law had underperformed. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of something his administration has tried, and failed, to do: Get doctors off paper and on to digital medical records...

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