[whistlerbrk]

As a former EMT and someone who built their own software to create run reports, I'm a bit skeptical as to that being the only reason.

Paper can be edited, even after the point at which you given a carbon copy to a hospital, if you're friendly enough. This probably doesn't happen often or at all but there is a psychological safety there.

People make small mistakes all the time on the ambulance in the rush to get them to the ER. We live in an extremely litigious society.

[ben509]

That's a good insight. Never dealt with any medical stuff, but I dealt with paperwork in the military as it was going through a (long painful) transition to electronic documents back in the '00s.

And I don't think it's just that society is litigous, but that databases actually (mostly?) work in terms of enforcing the rules you give them.

One anecdote of how things changed was that you used to be able to arrive on post, and if you didn't like your orders, talk to a sergeant major of another unit and quietly get your orders changed, which no doubt drove PERSCOM crazy.

When things were done with paper, there was a certain degree of flexibility in the rules that gave people some amount of local autonomy. When those rules are enforced by a computer, there's much less possibility of someone being able to override the rules when it makes sense.

Normal human social interaction tends to create unwritten rules that are simply more flexible and realistic than the rules we're willing or able to write down.

[beachy]

We have a platform that amongst other things automates filling in a fairly complex government form, including online signature.

We did a demo the other day to a large new customer. I learned that when they filled in the existing paper form, they didn't just sign it, they also stamped in the signature box with a little rubber stamp that "signed on behalf of the CEO".

It wasn't immediately clear whether anyone handling the form was looking for that stamp, nor what they did when they saw it. As a result, it's not clear to us at this stage whether our pdf generation now needs a new feature to allow a user-uploadable image file to be imprinted over the form.

That's the sort of thing you get with the joyous "flexibility" of paper.