The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of by Robert Wachter

By Robert Wachter

He big apple instances technology Bestseller from Robert Wachter, sleek Healthcare's number 1 so much Influential Physician-Executive within the US

While smooth drugs produces miracles, it additionally offers care that's too frequently harmful, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly pricey. For the previous few a long time, expertise has been touted because the treatment for all of healthcare's ills.

But medication stubbornly resisted computerization – formerly. over the last 5 years, thank you principally to billions of greenbacks in federal incentives, healthcare has ultimately long past digital.

Yet as soon as clinicians began utilizing desktops to truly convey care, it dawned on them that anything was once deeply unsuitable. Why have been medical professionals now not making eye touch with their sufferers? How may possibly considered one of America's major hospitals provide a 39-fold overdose of a typical antibiotic, regardless of a cutting-edge automated prescribing method? How may perhaps a recruiting advert for physicians tout the absence of an digital scientific checklist as a tremendous promoting point?

Logically adequate, we've pinned the issues on clunky software program, mistaken implementations, absurd rules, and undesirable karma. It used to be all of these issues, however it was once additionally anything way more complex. and much extra attention-grabbing . . .

Written with a unprecedented mix of compelling tales and hard-hitting research via one of many nation's so much considerate physicians, The electronic health care professional examines healthcare on the sunrise of its machine age. It tackles the difficult questions, from how know-how is altering care on the bedside as to if executive intervention has been worthwhile or harmful. And it does so with readability, perception, humor, and compassion. eventually, it's a hopeful story.

"We have to realize that desktops in healthcare don't easily exchange my doctor's scrawl with Helvetica 12," writes the writer Dr. Robert Wachter. "Instead, they rework the paintings, the folk who do it, and their relationships with one another and with sufferers. . . . definite, we must always have considered this quicker. yet it's now not too past due to get it right."

This riveting e-book deals the prescription for purchasing it correct, making it crucial studying for everybody – sufferer and supplier alike – who cares approximately our healthcare system.

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Extra info for The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

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Codman was an active bird hunter who had learned to gauge his own skill by measuring his ratio of kills to spent shells. With this in mind, in 1910 he began advocating for a so-called End Results Hospital, in which patient outcomes would be carefully tracked and reported. Codman believed that this would allow patients to make informed choices about where to receive surgical care, and would stimulate hospitals and doctors to improve the care they delivered. S. hospitals today—named its top quality award after him.

America’s decision during the Lincoln administration to standardize the gauge of its railroad tracks at 4 feet 8½ inches created an efficient national railway system. In contrast, Australia still lacks a single standard railway gauge. Because of this, at some interchanges, passengers and freight have to be transferred from one train to another; there are even circumstances in which entire trains are picked up and transported on the backs of others. Of course, the importance of standards is well appreciated in the technology world—it is why we can go to the hardware store and buy lightbulbs and electric cords and be confident that they will work when we get home.

Indd 10 2/12/15 12:42 PM Shovel Ready 11 But that touch was destined to be anything but light. An early hint of this came in Brailer’s first year as ONC director, when Modern Healthcare magazine named him the most influential person in healthcare. ) Bush, of course, was well known for his backslapping jocularity, accompanied by a penchant for pinning nicknames on staff members and journalists. “Someone cut out the Modern Healthcare cover and put it on the president’s desk when I met with him a few days later,” said Brailer.

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