The Electronic Health Record

Preface

The history of medical record keeping is generally presented in longitudinal terms that focus on changes in the material medium of the records themselves. The discussion therefore usually begins by identifying stone,^a clay,^b and string (quipus)^c as some of the first recording media and may even mentions wax^d as another early recording medium. The accounts then usually go on to say that these media were ultimately superseded by paper and then—while this is still an ongoing process—in the second half of the 20th century began to be replaced by electronic^e methods of recoding and storage.

This way of presenting the evolution of medical record keeping, however, is somewhat limited in scope. It ignores or underplays the fact that the introduction ...