Oh my god, we still have to write things down on paper?!
Yeah, and so what? Writing things down on paper is a damn tough pnemonic system to defeat.
The problem arises when others have to discern an individual's short hand notes.
So, an array of shitty post-notes is weak and lacks integrity, but similarly, so do disparate plain text files, haphazardly saved in an array of folders with haphazard file names. And yes, you could theoretically grep such a data store for meaningful details, but then again: Have you ever actually tried to parse someone else's randomly sorted plain text notes? It's a brain nullifying experience sifting through someone else's disorganized stream of consciousness.
This is a garbage-in-garbage-out scenario, and coping with a tide of inadvertently injured humanity does not lend itself to well-formed XML and proper SQL grammar. People don't plan on coughing up a lung, or getting shot, or run over. No one plans on syphlis dimentia.
You can bulldoze a landfill of printed circuit boards onto this problem, and still come back and say "boo-hoo, healthcare broken."
It's a hard problem, and there's always going to be a 50% share of elbow grease to pony up on the buy-in. Hospitals are hotels where people disintegrate in the most controlled manner possible.
Feel free to try and automate garbage collection in this environment. You'll assuredly end up with more bloated heap space than a Windows virtual machine running a JVM that emulates a .NET runtime environment.