Nine years ago, blogger Jaan Sidorov wrote about a new disease that a colleague dubbed ‘CoPaGA Syndrome’. CoPaGA [pronounced koh’ pah gah] is an acronym for Copy Paste Gone Amok.

In that post, he described what all of us have seen but didn’t know what to call it.

It was found in a consultant’s report about a patient containing “past data, prior notes, test results, excerpts, quotes, interpretations and correspondence that had been replicated word for word”.

What the patient told the doctor and what the doctor actually did, including his diagnosis and plan, “were inconspicuously buried towards the end of the e-health record document”.