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Clinical decision support systems to aid the clinician in making a correct diagnosis will only succeed if data from the clinical history are taken into account. However, currently, very little is known on diagnostic test characteristics of specific symptoms, let alone of a pattern of several symptoms with all their cardinal features. We plead for the nation-wide introduction of a standard for the structured recording of the clinical history. To allow for such structured recording, user interfaces of electronic healthcare records must become far more user-friendly. Furthermore, scribes may be used, or, ideally, a digital scribe, a computer application that records the conversation between healthcare professional and patient and creates an automated summary. So far, to our knowledge, no digital scribe encompassing the entire patient history has been implemented into medical practice. We are currently trying to develop such a digital scribe.