'At the cusp' of digital healthcare

Medicine arrived late to the information age. Years after banking, travel, retail, and most other industries went digital, hospitals and doctors' offices still featured endlessly ringing telephones, indecipherable handwritten documents, and busy mailrooms. But in the last five years, spurred in part by the Affordable Care Act's mandate for electronic health records, the medical world has embraced computers as a tool as vital as stethoscopes and X-rays. This past year, Partners Healthcare spent over a billion dollars adopting Epic, a system that allows a doctor to look up test results, answer a patient's questions, communicate with consultants, write prescriptions, and bill for his or her services, all with a few clicks.