If the cheerleaders — including the one in the Oval Office — are right, computerized medical records will save us all: save jobs, save money, reduce errors, and transform health care as we know it. In a January speech, President Obama evoked the promise of new technology: This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests," he said, and he has proposed investing $50 billion over the next five years to help make it happen.Any doctor will tell you the advantages of having lots of patient data on computers: it helps us avoid redundant tests, gather huge amounts of data for research, screen automatically for drug interactions, all with no problems with our famously illegible handwriting. I would be happy if every patient could hand me a digital file of everything about him; it could really save time on first visits. But against our government's push to get all patients' records computerized we must keep in mind there will be a cost to this — far beyond the billions to be spent setting it up. Many of us in medicine are concerned that the greatest cost will be in the quality of medicine that we practice.