My recent piece on a consulting CIO at a small hospital in Wisconsin has made me more aware of the issues involved in IT and health care.

In a recent issue of InformationWeek, Chad Eckes, who runs IT at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, describes his mother's treatment in an emergency room for kitchen burns where she was screaming in pain because they couldn't find her medical records to determine what painkillers were safe. He told his father, "If this had been my hospital we could have had the information in 15 seconds."