UHC serves 6500 hospitals and 1,300,000 physicians, with over 27,000,000 customers. I’m not sure you are visualizing how many “paper records” that would be over the course of a week, a month, a year. You are thinking about the thousands of ones they might need in the next month or two, I am thinking about the billions of pages that would have to be generated over a few years just in case something like a data breach would happen.
Stored on paper, even on microfiles or microfiche, it’s a prodigious amount of data we generate every day , and we’re long past the point of being able to cope with it in hard copy format.
There are some areas where that’s not obsolete. Perhaps car titles or land titles which change only every 5 or 10 years, but for hospitals with data streams on every procedure of every patient going through every doctors’ office or urgent care center or hospital every day? You might as well go back to delivering freight by Wells Fargo Stage Coach.
The right answer is: harden the new technology against the threats, just as we hardened railroads against roaming outlaws, airplanes against skyjackers, and stock transactions against swindlers. It won’t always be perfect, but at least we didn’t load the improvements down with things that made them impossible to use.