My Sunday Feeling

My little brother John just got back from Dallas where he negotiated a new position with a company that sells medical data systems. As I understand the business from his brief explanation yesterday, he will be selling systems for the retention of certain medical data like MRIs, X-rays and such. Evidently, electronic retention of all data is the latest thing in the medical business just as it is in the legal profession.

My own brief exposure to this came from Big Rollo, my intrepid cardiologist. Let me reiterate at this point that there is nothing wrong with me, praise God. It's just that the men in my family tend to cash in their chips at an untimely age. I go see Rollo every other year just to keep an eye on things. So far so good. Anyway, Little Rock Cardiology is virtually paperless. During my last visit, every step of the way: recording vitals, the results from the treadmill and the echo cardiograms, all were turned into "ones and zeroes" and put into a data base.

When Rollo came into the examination room afterwards, he invited me to pull up a chair next to a computer on a desk. "Watch this," he said. And with a push of a button all the data about my cardiovascular system was on the screen. On the top of the screen my EKG was running across like unto a stock ticker tape. On the bottom right was the computer's analysis of the treadmill test, along with height, weight etc. And on the the bottom left of the screen, the YouTube version of my poor little heart could be seen banging away for all it was worth.

"Is this not cool?" he said. " And let's say you move or you fire me as your cardiologist. With another push of the button all of this data in your virtual file goes with you in the blink of an eye. 100% secure and nothing gets lost. Do you have any idea how much medical information used to just get friggin' lost in transit the old way? Plus, not just anybody has access to your file anymore. This sure makes my job a hell of a lot easier."


Rollo was clearly pleased with their new toys at the Clinic. And I had to say that it was pretty amazing. And I am a person who is not easily amazed by technology. OK. I was amazed by PM's I-Touch. But it takes a lot to cause my jaw to drop.

What is amazing is that my brother, and other people in his line of work, will be selling, in addition to the hardware, space in the ether, a thing that does not tangibly exist in this, the tactile world. And he will be making a hell of a lot of money doing it too.

If you think about it, our money has been pretty much reduced to data as well. When I was in law school, I studied banking law and the Uniform Commercial Code version of what the old timers called "bills and notes." In that class, we learned such arcana about the Federal Reserve System (And no, we weren't taught that it was run by a Jewish conspiracy) and the law of what we quaintly referred to back then as "commercial paper." We learned how checks ran through the Federal Reserve system. We learned about "presentment" and what constituted a "holder in due course." I don't even know if they teach "commercial paper" anymore.

Of course, back in the day, and predictably using this newly acquired knowledge about the banking system for evil, my buddy Don created an elaborate float system involving 4 banks in 3 states. At the end of every month he would just start floating checks all over the Southeast until his Dad put money in his account. He once drew it out for me on a legal pad. It was a thing of beauty. Of course, Don's goals with this "scheme or device" as the prosecutor's call it was nothing more sinister than insuring sure he could buy whiskey and cigarettes at the KB at the end of the month while technically insolvent. Since then, I've seen schemes not much more sophisticated than Don's involving considerably more money.

That float system would harder to pull off nowadays because money is now mostly data. And data moves faster than the United States Mail. There are systems in place in most banks nowadays that are supposed to detect whenever somebody tries to "churn" an account. Think about it. I pay most of my bills,the ones I choose to pay that is, from my computer. All of my savings are automatically deducted from my paycheck, as are all of the wage assignments for my judgment creditors. And somebody, somewhere, is buying and selling the space in the ether to store all these "ones and zeroes."

Guys like my brother John who are laughing all of the way to what used to be the bank.