Twenty-five years ago, ATMs were novelties. Ten years ago, online banking was only for the brave. Today, both technologies are as mundane as the phone or refrigerator.
Next up on the road from cutting-edge to routine: the PHR, or personal health record. By the time President Obama or McCain is wrapping up work - whether that's in four years or eight - PHRs will be ubiquitous, at least according to some experts.
A PHR is an online repository of your medical history. Tech enthusiasts say it will revolutionize medicine in the same way the automated teller machine transformed banking.
Instead of carting, mailing or faxing folders full of paper records from doctor's office to clinic to hospital - and inevitably losing something on the way - you'll be able to store the information in one digital location, and then share it with whomever you choose.
To keep in touch with the digital near-future, we decided to take two of the most-likely-to-be-huge PHR services for a test-drive. The short version: Both are legitimate contenders, and both are worth a look.
First, some background: American medicine remains surprisingly nondigital: 90 percent of doctors' offices still keep medical records on paper. Lots of other countries are far ahead of us, and some, like Denmark, are all but completely digital.
Now, with the help of huge corporations that want to make you healthier - and, oh yeah, reap big profits while they're at it - medical digitization is upon us. Within the past few months, both Google and Microsoft have unveiled PHRs.
Because very few consumers are using these applications so far, the market remains fluid. There are other PHR entrants with excellent pedigrees, including Revolution Health, from AOL founder Steve Case, and Dossia, which is funded by AT&T and Wal-Mart, among others.
Several medical institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente, have set up proprietary PHRs, allowing patients to store and view their records online. In general, these applications are limited because they don't let you transfer the data to doctors outside the institution that sponsors them. But that could change: Last week, Kaiser and Microsoft announced a partnership that would allow some Kaiser patients to transfer data to Microsoft's PHR.
