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Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine?s Computer Age
McGraw-Hill
April 2015
On Sale: April 1, 2015
320 pages ISBN: 0071849467 EAN: 9780071849463 Kindle: B00TT5I9A0 Hardcover / e-Book
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Self-Help Health
From Robert Wachter, Modern Healthcare’s #1 Most Influential
Physician-Executive in the US While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers
care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and
impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology
has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare’s ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization – until
now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of
dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone
digital. Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually
deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply
wrong. Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with
their patients? How could one of America’s leading hospitals
give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic,
despite a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system?
How could a recruiting ad for physicians tout the absence of
an electronic medical record as a major selling point? Logically enough, we’ve pinned the problems on clunky
software, flawed implementations, absurd regulations, and
bad karma. It was all of those things, but it was also
something far more complicated. And far more interesting . . . Written with a rare combination of compelling stories and
hard-hitting analysis by one of the nation’s most thoughtful
physicians, The Digital Doctor examines healthcare at the
dawn of its computer age. It tackles the hard questions,
from how technology is changing care at the bedside to
whether government intervention has been useful or
destructive. And it does so with clarity, insight, humor,
and compassion. Ultimately, it is a hopeful story. "We need to recognize that computers in healthcare don’t
simply replace my doctor’s scrawl with Helvetica 12," writes
the author Dr. Robert Wachter. "Instead, they transform the
work, the people who do it, and their relationships with
each other and with patients. . . . Sure, we should have
thought of this sooner. But it’s not too late to get it right." This riveting book offers the prescription for getting it
right, making it essential reading for everyone – patient
and provider alike – who cares about our healthcare system.
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