Computerisation of records--using nonmedical staff for past history summarisation

An important component of a good medical record is a succinct history of key medical events for the patient. Unfortunately, accurately extracting and selecting such information from existing paper medical records in order to produce high quality records in electronic form is a difficult task for general practitioners to accommodate within the day-to-day demands of busy general practice. This article describes how a large Australian practice trained and used nonmedical staff to produce past medical history summaries of sufficient quality for the practice to be comfortable with computer record "paperless" consulting.