One Christmas, I went to an ER with a life-threatening condition that needed emergency surgery. After spending four hours in an ER so jam-packed there wasn't even a place to sit down (and the floor was too filthy to sit or lie down there) without even so much as a brief triage, I called a friend to take me home, figuring I'd rather die in my bed than shivering on a concrete bench outside the ER, in the company of a young woman who was miscarrying a pregnancy and also getting exactly zero medical care.

Not until the next morning was I able to get someone to take me to a hospital in a more upscale section of the city, where after 19 hours of excruciating pain I was slapped into the operating room.

I was lucky I didn't die, and I am thankful for the surgeons and the competent staff at the second hospital who did something other than tell me to take a seat. If it had happened 50 years ago and treatment had been delayed that long, I would have died…but on the other hand, 50 years ago people who went to the ER went there because they had real emergencies, not colds and flu, and a 19-hour wait would have been unthinkable.

One Christmas, I went to an ER with a life-threatening condition that needed emergency surgery. After spending four hours in an ER so jam-packed there wasn't even a place to sit down (and the floor was too filthy to sit or lie down there) without even so much as a brief triage, I called a friend to take me home, figuring I'd rather die in my bed than shivering on a concrete bench outside the ER, in the company of a young woman who was miscarrying a pregnancy and also getting exactly zero medical care.

Not until the next morning was I able to get someone to take me to a hospital in a more upscale section of the city, where after 19 hours of excruciating pain I was slapped into the operating room.

I was lucky I didn't die, and I am thankful for the surgeons and the competent staff at the second hospital who did something other than tell me to take a seat. If it had happened 50 years ago and treatment had been delayed that long, I would have died…but on the other hand, 50 years ago people who went to the ER went there because they had real emergencies, not colds and flu, and a 19-hour wait would have been unthinkable.

There is a standardized medical records system called EMR, but its expensive and difficult to implement. So, many hospitals haven't. There is also a standard interface for medical equipment that works over ethernet, but often hospitals don't have the networked devices hooked up.

So, I guess we still have a long way to go.