digital health - digital property

The whole world is turning digital. It is just a matter of time for the circle to turn.

The holy grail is to convert mountains of paper into digital electronic paper. It is so much easier to search and access digital records & archives than to make a request for a paper copy.

Human Services Minister Joe Hockey last week said his department would look at destroying 275km of paper records held by Centrelink and three square kilometres of Medicare records as part of the access card project. That means Centrelink alone would require at least 69TB to store all of its paper-based records. The systems required to undertake such a project would be several thousand digital cameras, printers and scanners. For a copy of the story Australian IT

Property is not a dissimilar story. Conveyancing from end to end is the story of pass the bits of paper around. And kick my butt if you or the client or the bank or the settlement agent or australia post should lose one of those bits of paper. The whole process can be digitised and think how better off we all would be.

And how much paper is consumed in Victoria for property transactions? For residential conveyancing I estimate that we use 52km of paper every year. Across Australia that figure would multiply out to 173km of paper consumed per year. Mmmmmmmmm