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This paper studies the origin and evolution of three health archives at the Hospital de León that forms part of the Public Health Service of the region of Castilla and León (Spain). The principle of provenance is essential to decide upon the organisation of medical histories archives and all the documents included in them. The study assesses the management of the above mentioned health archives in order to highlight the importance of appropriate cataloguing, shelving and storage of medical records for an efficient day–to–day running of hospitals. The results will be useful in estimating the approximate cost of a proper archives management when taking into account factors such as patients staying longer than expected in hospital or the need to repeat medical tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical record is a document with particular characteristics that requires a different documental management, has different uses and users that use it with different interest, to preserve its usefulness and in order to comply the legal normativity from each country it is necessary to change the traditional way it have been build (through manuscript files addition) and apply new technologies of the information and communication (TIC). This article presents the main different advantages and disadvantages of the Computarized Medical Records (CMR) compared with the traditional paper MR, according to it's different uses and users as well as the required conditions to make each one of it an efficient document. Colombian and Spain cases were analyzed, comparing normative conditions and technological development, with the proposal of obtaining a comparative parameter that allow us to determine future trends in the integration of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]