As Washington bureaucrats struggle to protect the privacy of medical records, some doctors are already using cutting-edge technology to snatch the information they need . Some grab files from another hospital on a secured Internet. Others plug a patient's 'smart card' into a computer to read the most recent records, including EKG, MRI and x-ray images. There are banklike cards with records on magnetic stripes and others that just have a phone number linking doctors with people who sit ready to fax records out fast. These programmes will likly serve as models for a proposed national health information system, part of which was frozen by the White House last week because of privacy fears.