The Memphis area is one of a growing number of regions or states with a health information exchange, which enables electronic patient data to be shared among hospitals and physicians. Nearly all of the hospitals and public clinics participate, which allows their emergency department doctors and other authorized personnel to call up patients' blood tests, imaging scan reports and hospital discharge summaries.

The three-year-old exchange is helping doctors make better decisions and avoid wasting money on duplicative tests. Records for about one million people have been collected so far.

Christopher Sands, an internal medicine hospitalist at Methodist University hospital, has made the exchange part of his regular routine. When he arrives at about 6 a.m., he logs onto the exchange to dig out records for patients who were admitted the night before. He prints out their reports and attaches them to the patients' chart.

"Patients are sometimes confused about what they were told" about a previous hospital visit, Sands says. Finding lab and pathology reports, and especially discharge summaries, "is gospel," he says. He cancels diagnostic tests, including expensive radiology scans, when he finds one was done days earlier at another hospital.

Another benefit: spotting suspecting drug abusers who sometimes come to emergency departments complaining of pain in hopes of getting narcotics. Sands says he recently decided against a battery of tests for a 37-year-old man who complained about pain after records showed he had just had a complete workup while spending a week at another hospital. Physicians say their patients are delighted that their records are online.

Ron Bolen, a 64-year-old furniture salesman who suffers from diverticulitis, was able to stay out of the hospital recently after Edwards ordered a CT scan and compared it to the results of three others performed at other facilities. "He told me those records influenced what he did," says Bolen, who went home that night with painkillers and antibiotics.

Read more about how Memphis Data-Sharing is Saving Lives.