September 27, 2011
Google just turned 13 years old (9/27/1998), and I feel old. I remember toiling away as an undergrad in the engineering computer lab, using NCSA’s Mosaic as my browser and AltaVista as my main search engine. I also remember my first encounter with a laboratory information system (LIS) as a medical student, using a light pen to call up a floor census and printing out pages of labs to stuff into my pockets for rounds. EMRs were barely there, paper was everywhere. The big movement in all parts of health care IT at the time was “get the data into the computer,” and all of those printouts, paper charts, and the like slowly migrated into an electronic format.
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