How private are your medical records? If they’re on paper, the answer is, not very.

Paper and film records are available to everyone from office clerks, to porters wheeling wheelchairs, to technicians, to nurses and doctors. They’re lost, squirreled away, fraudulently requested, stolen, misfiled, left open on desks, dropped between pieces of furniture or the seats of vans, and damaged by fire, flood, and time. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, nearly a million peoples’ records were lost. Further, records on paper and other media take up huge amounts of space, and the long-term storage required by law presents enormous difficulties.

Electronic medical records, by contrast, are typically more accurate and have strict security measures in place to prevent misuse and unauthorized access. Securing the privacy of digitized medical records on a nationwide scale, say experts, would indeed be a technical challenge—but not an insoluble one.

An additional benefit of a nationwide system of digitized medical records? It could facilitate clinical drug trials by making it easier to find potential participants,which in turn would make it faster and less expensive to bring new drugs to market.