The Digital Doctor Quotes

“One of the great challenges in healthcare technology is that medicine is at once an enormous business and an exquisitely human endeavor; it requires the ruthless efficiency of the modern manufacturing plant and the gentle hand-holding of the parish priest; it is about science, but also about art; it is eminently quantifiable and yet stubbornly not.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body:             The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Ross”
― Robert M. Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“But laboratory, radiology, and pathology results were computerized relatively early (many hospitals and clinics did so in the 1990s), and some healthcare systems began experimenting with giving patients access to them.21 While this information was less fraught than doctors’ notes, many in the medical establishment still worried about how patients might handle seeing such results unfiltered.”
― Robert M. Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“The Innovator’s Prescription,”
― Robert M. Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Burton’s observations on the surgery service reflected this haphazard abundance. The NPs had to log in to 11 different information systems—an OR scheduling system, a separate clinic scheduling system, an outpatient medication system, and so on—to gather what they needed. This digital Easter egg hunt required more than 600 clicks, accompanied by more than 200 screen transitions. Besides the sheer insanity of the enterprise, the problem is that with each screen flip, your brain must process the new visual information—which generates the neuronal equivalent of the brief static you sometimes see on the TV screen when you’re channel surfing—and before long, all of your cognitive bandwidth is exhausted. He recalled a few cases in which the NPs missed obvious things, like a significant fall in the blood count, because “all they’re doing is foraging for information, writing it down, not even paying attention.”
― Robert M. Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Organizational factors that unlock the value of IT are costly and time consuming,” Brynjolfsson and a colleague wrote in 1998. “For every dollar of IT there are several dollars of organizational investment that, when combined, generate the large rise in measured firm productivity and value.” This means that an organization’s capacity to avoid treating its IT implementation as a “one and done,” and to keep investing and evolving, is what ultimately determines the outcome.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Automation does not simply supplant human activity but rather changes it, often in ways unintended and unanticipated by the designers. —Automation experts Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey, 2010”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it. —Clint Eastwood as “Dirty Harry,” Magnum Force, 1973”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Doctors think they are more important in their patients’ lives than their patients do.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“There’s a saying in aviation that the airplane of the future will no longer have two humans in the cockpit. Instead, there will be a pilot and a dog. The pilot will be there to keep the dog company. The dog will be there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch the controls.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it’s not intuitive and if the end user can’t use it.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 During my visit to UCSF’s seventh-floor satellite pharmacy, I saw the pharmacists verifying many medication orders. A”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“We have Dragon [dictation software],” one primary care doctor said, “which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] ‘Patient’s prostate is bothering him’ and it turned out ‘Patient’s prostitute is bothering him.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Emergency department physicians spent 44 percent of their time entering data into electronic medical records, clicking up to 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift. —Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review magazine, October 11, 2013”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. —Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1717–1797)”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“As Stravinsky says, art is nothing more than placing limits and working against them rigorously … and if we refuse to place them … you do not have art, you have chaos, and to a large extent that’s what we’ve had.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that notes written by internists read like novellas (ones in which we’re paid by the word), while a colleague of mine jokes that a typical post-op surgical note reads something like “Feeling well and doing swell.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“You’ve probably played that parlor game in which you fantasize about what it would be like to have a drink with one of the great figures in history. Perhaps”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Informatics is the field of medicine that concerns itself with “the interactions among and between humans and information tools and systems.” In 2013, it became an official specialty, like cardiology or obstetrics, with its own board certification.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the technology works.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“While someday the computerization of medicine will surely be that long-awaited “disruptive innovation,” today it’s often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, of clinicians’ professional interactions and work flow, and of the way we measure and try to improve things. I”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“We have Dragon dictation software', one primary doctor said, 'which you have to be careful of, because, I just dictated: "patient's prostate is bothering him" and it turned out: "patient's prostitute is bothering him.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“61% of physicians felt their EHR improved the quality of care they delivered to patients, but only 1 in 3 said it had improved their job satisfaction, and 1 in 5 said they would go back to paper if they could.

Tellingly, the more advanced the EHR; for example, systems that offered reminders, alerts, and messaging capability, the greater the unhappiness.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“And for a personal health record to be truly transformative, it will need to be far more than a passive window into the medical record, with a scheduling and medication refill module tacked on. It will have to be dynamic, engaging, and capable of interacting with patients and families in ways that ultimately lead to better health. While Google and Microsoft were trying to find ways to give patients direct access to their records via the Web, others have focused on what might seem to be an easier problem: sharing records between”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“Patients possess a body of knowledge about themselves that we can never hope to master, and we have a body of knowledge about medicine that they can never hope to master. Our job is to bring these two groups together so we can serve each other well.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“If you do a single thing—and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a ‘Welcome, Robots!’ doormat outside your office,” wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. “They’re coming for you.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“people working collaboratively with technology are far more effective than either people or technology alone.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

“I am convinced that the human side of medicine will be nurtured in the digital era only if both patients and clinicians value it and demand it.”
― Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age