Oct. 5--You can pay your phone bill online, but you still need a pen and clipboard to fill out forms at a doctor's office. You can check in for a flight on the Internet, but you have to carry around a slip of paper with handwritten instructions to fill a prescription. You can get six years of your shopping history from Amazon.com, but good luck finding a vaccine record from 2003.

The rest of the world has embraced e-mail, online forms and iPhone apps, but health care still communicates in the centuries-old technology of paper.

For the past four years, a raft of tech companies, including Microsoft, have been hoping to change that, making a major push into developing software for the health-care industry, what CEO Steve Ballmer refers to as "the largest segment of the world's economy."

The rush of companies, from niche players such as Epic to large newcomers like Google, comes as the White House and Congress debate the future of health care, how to provide coverage to the uninsured and the disparities in costs. Companies such as Microsoft, not surprisingly, say software is key to providing more effective and efficient care.

There is money to be made converting hospitals from paper to electronic records. Kaiser Permanente, a nonprofit health plan based in California, spent $4 billion making the switch, in what Kaiser claims was the largest nonmilitary installation in the country.

At a company known for building software for the masses, a single operating system to rule them all, the Microsoft Health Solutions Group has been targeting this one industry with new software products. The group, which has grown from a team of four to 600, wants to bring the unautomated parts of health care into the digital era.

"If you go see doctors, they ask you a bunch of questions to solve a set of problems, they apply some logic and arrive at a solution, rinse and repeat," said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the health group, part of Microsoft Research.

Managing data

"It's fundamentally a data-management problem and it's a hard one. It needs a lot of help in being innovative and thoughtful and aggressive about how to help solve those problems to deliver better value for the provider and better outcome for the consumer."

Neupert is a former chief executive of Bellevue-based drugstore.com. Before that he was director of operating systems at Microsoft until 1998. He rejoined the company in 2005.