Governor Doyle talked about electronic medical records in his State of the State speech and President Bush pushed the idea in his State of the Union Address.

But what are the risks of having all that health information at the click of a mouse?

This week the investigative arm of congress published a report saying there's no clear strategy to protect patient privacy with electronic medical records.

The report refers to the presidents plan for a "nationwide health information network." That network would allow hospitals to pull up medical histories for anyone anywhere. Right now a number of hospitals in the area rely in part on electronic records. Sacred Heart stores data on more than 400,000 patients dating back ten years on these servers. The records allow doctors like Kirk Dahl to pull critical information in a hurry.

"Literally it just takes seconds," says Dr. Dahl. "We just need a name, we don't even need a date of birth or a medical record number and we get immediate access to any records of the past six months and through the archive system we can get records dating back well beyond that."

Dahl says such records allows doctors to better treat patients when they're seriously hurt or unconscious.

Information technology director Pete Nohelty says the hospital takes extra care to make sure only those who need to, are accessing data

"Our medical records system makes sure that each individual who accesses it has unique log-ins, unique passwords. It also has restrictions on exactly what the person can see, what types of records," explains Nohelty.

The hospital also conducts regular audits to check who's looking at what and why. Nohelty says while the hospital does everything it can to protect patient privacy, he agrees it would be a good idea to set uniform privacy standards, especially if the President wants hospitals to share information nationwide.