Arriving home from work one day, Judy Faulkner saw her husband, Gordon, was distraught. A pediatrician, he had just learned that a young girl previously under his care in Madison, Wisconsin, had died. Her family had moved to Milwaukee, 75 miles away, and when the girl fell ill, the physicians at a new hospital didn’t know how to treat her because they had no ability to access her medical records. Faulkner’s anguished husband insisted that if the hospital staff had had the girl’s medical history, they’d have known what to do and would have saved her life.
The next day, Judy went back to work, determined to do what she could to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.