>I had to make a visit to the emergency room over christmas. To my surprise, the prescriptions were printed out by computer. As long as the doctor selected or entered the correct drug and dosage from the database, the computer printed it out for the pharmacy. That was in the Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro. However, the military has been doing this for years. A doctor has to select a drug from a database and an approved dosage and the prescription is printed and goes directly to the screen at the pharmacy. You walk over to the pharmacy (it is in the same building) and your prescriptions are usually already ready and waiting for you.

My company back home was doing a lot of development for the health system (yes, there IS such a beast :), and I had to learn more about it than I ever wanted to know.

Our area being adjacent to both Romania and Hungary, there was a lot of smuggling. The contraband involved anything that would sell profitably on the other side - and in this particular case it was contraception pills to Romania. Ceauşescu was keen on ruling a big nation, so he simply ordered multiplication and banned contraception.

To obtain these in Yugoslavia you simply went to your doctor, underwent some physical checking, and got them, in 4 or 6 month doses. Now if your friendly doctor was in on the scheme, he'd churn prescriptions on any old name from the files, including males and women over 60.

Some time in mid 80s a system was introduced where each prescription had to be coded - doctor's nr, drug nr, diagnose nr (as per WHO IX revision, maybe VIII at the time). There even were computers for that. There was no software yet, and no data acquisition of any kind, but the change of the form was sufficient - all of a sudden, Social Security (which covers health and retirements there) started saving huge loads of money, because doctors got the impression they could be easily tracked :).