2016?

This morning, I spent nearly three hours in the ER making phone calls, filling out consent forms, and faxing them in order to obtain a patient's medical record because of his complicated history of ventricular tachycardia (problems with the heart rhythm for the largest chambers of the heart) and the possibility that his pacemaker was malfunctioning.  Three hours later, I had only one medical record, one that took nearly 30 minutes to fax.  The other medical record could not be faxed because our line was busy.  I called back on the landline.  The people who faxed the records were not there.  After 4-5 rounds of faxing attempts, phone calls, and faxes, they finally received the form.

The patient left against medical advice that he might drop dead if he went into v-tach and his pacemaker wasn't working.  He left anyway.

I never did get the medical records.

And this is 2016 in a state-of-the-art hospital with robotic surgery, image-guided surgical navigation, and machines that can reset your heart... we cannot get medical records from hospital to hospital in any sane or efficient manner.

Medicine is a weird cross between high-tech, multimillion dollar surgical suites and ridiculously time-wasting, pseudo-medieval methods of communication.