Doctors' lousy handwriting is infamous. Every day pharmacists stop customers to ask them what their prescriptions say, and patients pick up orders only to find that they've been given the wrong dosage or even the wrong drug. But those pharmacist misreads can mean more than mere hassles.

In a 1999 study, the Institute of Medicine reported that in 1993, almost 7,400 Americans died from medication errors. A decade later, such errors are still a major problem. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, has posted a notice on its Web site warning that patients with prescriptions for its antiseizure drug Lamictal have mistakenly received Lamisil (a medication for fighting nail fungus), Lomotil (an antidiarrheal), Ludiomil (an antidepressant), and other medications-sometimes with dire consequences.

One basic change-using computers to order prescriptions-has reduced   medication errors by as much as 80 percent in some hospitals. Motivated by such life-and-death statistics, a growing though still-small number of doctors and hospitals are weaning themselves from paper, using computers not just to order prescriptions and lab tests but also to track patients' conditions, medications, allergies, and test results. "We could make tremendous advances in improving health care with the technology that we have in hand," says Gilad Kuperman, associate director of clinical informatics research and development for Partners Healthcare System in Boston.

Those advances would be a welcome change from the messy, difficult-to-track record keeping that prevails in health care today. Typically, the primary care physician keeps one set of records, hospitals another, and each specialist yet another. And all of these medical histories are logged in old-fashioned paper "charts." Any information a patient forgets to tell one of his or her doctors-about a severe allergy to a medication, say,-simply doesn't appear in that doctor's record.