Ski Lodge More Efficient Than Doctor's Office!

I'd arrived at Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Valley ski area Friday around 2PM - and I only had the next day to get in some quick skiing before business meetings on Sunday.

Looking to get an early morning start on the slopes Saturday, I decided to stop by the base lodge and rental shop to check things out in advance just after I'd checked in to my hotel.

I was delighted when I found the rental shop offered a very nice feature: early "online" registration. All too often, Saturday morning at a ski rental area means waiting on long lines and filling out endless forms and releases.

But this shop had a computer terminal and I simply entered all my info (age, height, weight, shoe size etc), saved it to their computer, and printed out a reciept.

When I arrived at the shop Saturday morning at 8AM, I handed them my papers and was on the slopes just minutes later (that's a photo of me an hour later, at the peak of Heavenly, with Lake Tahoe in the background).

Contrast this efficient and customer-friendly program with the ridiculous scene that occurs in so many doctors and dentists offices every day all across the country...

"Oh, you haven't been here in 6 months? Fill out these 8 pages of forms. I know, we have the old ones with 99% of the same information but I need these all new."

Arghhhhhh.

So you spend 10 minutes filling out the same crap and then some clerk spends 20 minutes typing it in and probably getting half of it wrong. So the insurance company then spends 30 minutes processing a bad claim.

Would it be too much for medical professionals to have some kind of online or computer data entry forms for their patients? Just set up some system on a table in the corner when you first check in?

Seems like it would be a win/win to me.