I thought you'd enjoy this article by the regardless Dr. Gawande. If you don't have time for the whole article, the salient excerpts are below.
"...we've reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers."
[The hospital software upgrade to EPIC software] would cost the hospital system...a staggering $1.6 billion, but it aimed to keep us technologically up to date.
More than ninety per cent of American hospitals have been computerized during the past decade, and more than half of Americans have their health information in the Epic system.
physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face to face with a patient
Doctors' handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information...
The inconsistencies began to make sense when a team at the Mayo Clinic discovered that one of the strongest predictors of burnout was how much time an individual spent tied up doing computer documentation.
...defined burnout as a combination of three distinct feelings: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (a cynical, instrumental attitude toward others), and a sense of personal ineffectiveness.
Indeed, the computer, by virtue of its brittle nature, seems to require that it come first. Brittleness is the inability of a system to cope with surprises, and, as we apply computers to situations that are ever more interconnected and layered, our systems are confounded by ever more surprises.
The story of modern medicine is the story of our human struggle with complexity. Technology will, without question, continually increase our ability to make diagnoses, to peer more deeply inside the body and the brain, to offer more treatments. It will help us document it all—but not necessarily to make sense of it all. Technology inevitably produces more noise and new uncertainties.
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