Robert Wachter Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mistakes, on the other hand, result from incorrect choices. Rather than blundering into them while we are distracted, we usually make mistakes because of insufficient knowledge, lack of experience or training, inadequate information (or inability to interpret available information properly), or applying the wrong set of rules or algorithms to a decision

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

If we go into the visit with both parties knowing what's going on, then we can spend the visit talking about what we do about it.

James Reason reminds us, "Errors are largely unintentional. It is very difficult for management to control what people did not intend to do in the first place.

Smart Patients and other online communities are demonstrating that patients can learn a tremendous amount from one another.

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.

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.

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

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.

McGlynn EA, Asch SM, Adams J, et al. The quality of health care delivered to adults in the United States.

more data-driven, automated healthcare will displace up to 80 percent of physicians' diagnostic and prescription work."12

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

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.