Yes, I know how expensive these systems are to implement. I worked in high tech. Maintaining all health data in a global database offers great benefit to medicine. It would be possible to identify trends and analyze results of different treatments against different medical profiles for a large population with ease. The Affordable Care Act mandated patient information be digitized that test results be made availabe to patients online - before you had to request copies from your doctor. I remember one doctor's office that had patients enter their data in a computer! Some help was provided to medical practices but I have observed how small clincis have only basis Internet sites. Sometimes they work with other offices to use the same system. The bigger places have the $$$ to install more sophisticated systems. But a developed MyChart allows one to even run a comparison of test results over time even between institutions. Medicare actually tracks some of your medical information. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have all one's reports uploaded to Medicare site. Granted there would be security issues, but a "global database in the sky" is what is needed for healthcare data to study disease.