If the system were electronic and all documents were digitized and stored in one convenient place, a visit to the doctor would take much less time and would not require endlessly repeating the same history. This “convenient place” is the cloud.

President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the so-called “stimulus law”) allocated more than $20 billion to digitize medical records. PracticeFusion, a San Francisco-based medical records digitization community, includes 120,000 medical professionals and stores 22 million medical records in the cloud, accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. By digitizing medical records, doctors are fighting inefficiencies and medical errors.

The PracticeFusion community was founded in 2005 by Ryan Howard, who works in software rather than medicine. Mashable sat down with Howard to discuss the importance of the transition to electronic medical records (EMRs) and what the future holds for the process.

How it all started
Howard came to the San Francisco Bay Area during the “gold rush” of companies selling services online, and has had a career ranging from tech support employee to software installation specialist at the large Brown & Toland physician community. It was here that he first noticed the “worthless technology” in the physician’s office. “Doctors didn’t want to use it, the software was incredibly complex and was a total headache,” Howard says. – That’s when I realized how far away free Internet services like Google, which had revolutionized the consumer market, were from what was happening in the health care sector.”

So he founded the PracticeFusion community in 2005 and launched a free EMD storage service in 2007. “‘Free’ is the key word here,” Howard clarifies, “because it actually costs $50,000 per physician per year to maintain the system.”

According to Howard, 200,000 people around the world die each year from medical errors, mistakes that could be avoided if physicians were to master EMDs. “Paper is not cheap and it’s not safe, and it doesn’t belong in the medical care world anymore,” he adds. – Our job is to enable physicians to save those lives by making patient medical information available anytime, anywhere.”