Networking: Portals for medical care

A patient refills her prescription for Diuril online, a high-blood-pressure medication, without having to walk down the street in the summer heat and wait for the local pharmacist to fill out the prescription.

Though rare today, Internet-based "patient portals," like the one at Detroit's Henry Ford Health System, which is a network of 24 primary-care centers that makes it one of America's largest healthcare systems, will become increasingly common in the future. By Gene Koprowski