Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)
I created the open source ClearHealth/HealthCloud EMR system, have managed hundreds of medical facilities large and small and am the author of "Hacking Healthcare". There are a lot of layers to this and competing concerns. This article is misguided at best. The quote "Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society" is hilariously off the mark. The average age of doctors in the US is 51.Amongst many difficult problems related to this:-Medicare/Medicaid/Federal spending is half to 2/3 of all medical spending. They are insanely bureaucratic and simultaneously penny pinching. They require lots of things that make everyones jobs harder with no obvious benefit to anyone. They dictate in many ways how software must work in medical settings.-Doctors in most institutions are not given an adequate amount of time to accomplish all of the things that need to be accomplished to deliver quality care and also get properly paid for the interaction. This in part is financially driven but I would say it mostly occurs because there is little to no accountability for medical systems to operate well or efficiently. In many situations there are perverse incentives to operate inefficiently.-Doctors make an absolutely shocking amount of substantive errors, 25% of interactions or more. Preventable medical error is almost certainly in the top 5 causes of deaths in the united states.I could go on and on but cherry picking but I think I made my point that this article looks only at one perspective of one facet of disgruntled personnel involved in a single implementation.