For example: we used to (still do) keep large files of old notes for patients. In the worst cases think reams of paper three inches thick held together by the flimsiest of plastic ties.

The solution for computerising this? Scan it all. Categorise by date and medical specialty. Unfortunately using this database turns out to be horrendously slow. Each doctor has to download each page from the database in order to look at it and make sure it's not the page they are looking for (no or poor text recognition). As you can imagine, hundreds of doctors doing this at 9am in the morning grinds the network to a halt.

That's just one component of the system we use every day - I have more!