Patient privacy best protected by a doctor's poor handwriting.

Back when giants ruled the earth, a snooper need to trek across the country, ask a harried file clerk for the file that hopefully wasn't lost, wade through a a foot thick folder, then hopefully decipher the doctors shitty handwriting before finding out about anything juicy. In any case, the file was burned in 7 years or so because the file room needed space.

Nowadays, any secretary can instantly access the data from a computer on the other side of the continent and the files are never purged.