If only hospital systems didn’t force their physicians to use structured data. Administration loves structured data because it is an easy road to hoodwinking a jury into saying it’s professional negligence on part of a physician or plain bad luck on the patient’s part. It makes it easy for the losers who love to point out “see, it’s all right there in the medical record.”
You can support a structured way to add unstructured data. This can be useful a s a stopgap to understand where the structured data is inadequate, but I can become a hindrance if they don't use the structured data all.
This is precisely what MediaWiki tries to do, and it's why I love this software more than anything. You have templates and forms that the user can fill out, but the page is really a piece of paper - outside of the template you can write anything you want at all. With Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki you can even make a database out of the structured parts, and any record always includes the page from which that piece of data originated, so you can link to it to see the full context.
MediaWiki won't scale to support billions of records in a database, but for small to medium sized things imo it's perfect.
