>I have a VFP 7 application with about 60 tables and 10,000 data fields. About 30 of the fields in 5 different tables are unique patient identifiers and must be encrypted. Should I encrypt just those fields or the entire tables?
>I have been using CAPICOM and its 3DES algorithm which I understand is very secure, and it works fine, but a field such as patient name which was a 30 character field must now be a 250 character field to allow for the longer encrypted string. Dates are an even bigger problem, as they can no longer be stored in date fields, but must be stored in character fields as well. What is the best solution?

Two options would be to make use of the Windows CryptoAPI, or to use Xitech's Cryptor product. If you do a search on either of these terms you will find other threads here discussing them.