Some experts now believe it will take another generation to bring about the technological and behavioral changes that are necessary. Workers who made the effort to go paperless have been newsworthy exceptions, not the rule. The rest of us, however, are still printing out our correspondence, making hard copies of documents already backed up on a company network, faxing messages instead of sending e-mails, printing Web pages to save them for future reference, and so on. He thinks most people print because it's inconvenient to look at a display for a long period of time. We have actually achieved a high level of paperless-ness, but we are working with substantially more information in an electronic form.
Some industries seem to be moving faster than others.
It's been years since many of us received canceled paper checks back from the bank, for example. Hundreds of companies are earnestly trying to convince the nation's doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic patient records, billing, and scheduling software. This makes perfect sense if you consider the cumbersome paper trail that runs throughout most doctors' offices. The threat of jail time or fines for insurance fraud if patient records do not justify insurance bills is a real one, according to Andrew Proctor, a product specialist with MedicWare in California. But doctors who go paperless, says Proctor, will save on transcription and storage fees and the cost of staff time to find and pull patient charts.