Advanced outcomes

There's no doubt health care is a lot more high-tech today than it was 20 years ago. To start, both patients and doctors have a lot more information at their fingertips.

“You used to have to go to the medical library and pull articles,” says Dr. Kirk Voelker, medical director of Sarasota Memorial Health Care System's Clinical Research Center. “Now you have a whole medical library on your iPhone. That's a huge thing.”

Most patient records are now stored electronically rather than in file cabinets at a single doctor's office. This shift was intended to give any doctor easy access to a patient's records. It required providers to make some big changes in everything from workflow to staffing. And while it's led to some improvements, it's still not a perfect system due to a lack of uniformity among providers.