> A clinic could use the system to search its patient records and find, for example, all the men over age 45 who were overdue for a colonoscopy, and then use an autocall to remind them to schedule the dreaded appointment.
Even if successful, a system which could "interpret" a health record (such as a freetext note) using anything other than properly codified data would set the health industry back a decade. Moving doctors away from freetexting their notes is the only way to advance the industry.
Doing so could have incredible utility for sharing data across various clinics/hospitals/pharmacies/etc.
My previous doctor (who was probably mid-50s) didn't use email or any kind of secure electronic messaging system. Everything had to be faxed to him.
My new doctor who is younger uses all kinds of digital tools including a voice recorder with a pre-trained text-to-speech engine that understands medical terminology and codifies the transcription based on keywords.
So it's not entirely getting away from freetext but at least it's extracting some structured data from it automatically.
Maybe this was a terrible example, and the author didn't grasp a good example of legitimately non-schematic data points?