Resumen
Virtual patient records will impact health care internationally the way the Internet and the World Wide Web transformed global communications. At the same time that political and sociological conditions are causing a revolution in health care, advanced technologies promise to introduce changes even more radical. Health care has long lagged far behind other industries in adopting information technologies. More recently, pressures to better manage rising costs have generated an intense interest in how the latest computing technologies can help. Virtual patient records are virtual in the sense they provide a view of data possibly configured differently at different locations, but united together into a common format for viewing at the required time. Virtual patient records provide a user with virtual access to data possibly scattered around the world. This principle of accessing information on demand from a distributed pool of resources is analogous to the way virtual memory creates larger memory spaces by accessing supplemental storage only when required.