A decade ago, electronic health records were aggressively promoted for a number of reasons. Proponents claimed that they would facilitate the sharing of health information, reduce error rates in healthcare, increase healthcare efficiency, and lower costs. Enthusiasts included the technology companies, consultants, and IT specialists who stood to reap substantial financial rewards from a system-wide switch to electronic records.
Even some health professionals shared in the enthusiasm. Compared to the three ring-binders that once held the medical records of many hospitalized patients, electronic records would reduce errors attributable to poor penmanship, improve the speed with which health professionals could access information, and serve as searchable information repositories, enabling new breakthroughs through the mining of “big data.”
To promote the transition to electronic records, the federal government launched what it called its “Meaningful Use” program, a system of financial rewards and penalties intended to ensure that patients would benefit. Naturally, this raised an important question: if digitizing health records was such a good idea, why did the federal government need to impose penalties for health professionals who failed to adopt them? Perhaps electronic health records were not so self-evidently beneficial as proponents suggested.
Think about your experience in going to a standard doctor’s appointment. You fight traffic or parking hassles to get to the doctor’s office. You often wait past your appointment time in the lobby, and once you actually get into the exam room, you wait again for the doctor to actually arrive. While it may be a few minutes, it can sometimes feel excruciatingly long. The doctor arrives, and despite all the paperwork and information you shared with the receptionist or the nurse, you repeat much of this information. Once you finish your exam and discussion with the doctor – during which you sometimes take notes, sometimes not – you walk out and have that awkward moment at the front desk, wondering if you can leave freely or if you owe large sums of cash.
I was talking with a few friends not long ago. Our conversation somehow got to the issue of authority, and what exactly respect for authority looks like. One of them, trying to make a point, turned to me and asked: “So you surely deal with people who don’t listen to what you have to say. What do you do when your patients don’t take the medications you prescribe?”
We live in a headline/hyperlinked world. A couple of years back, I learned through happenstance that my most popular blog posts all had catchy titles. I’m pretty confident that people who read this blog do more than scan the titles, but there is so much information coming at us these days, it’s often difficult to get much beyond the headline. Another phenomenon of information overload is that we naturally apply 
