>>>Common sense says don't send OBGYN records onto the internet in the clear. Sadly this common sense isn't all that common, so laws are needed- with those laws demonstrating that common sense is even less common than you'd hope.
>>
>>What terrible things will happen if I know that someone is pregnant or having problems with a pregnancy?
>>A lot more terrible things might happen if I don't know that/
>
>...thus the need for things like HL-7 ...makes it easy to transfer medical data between systems :)

The first time I saw a HL7 file, it was on a 5,25 inch floppy, coming from a box with a 6502 processor :).