For reasons a little lost in the fog we have committed to doing an episode of Health in 2 Point 00 every day at HIMSS. As I didn’t meet my co-host Jessica DaMassa till late it was more like “Health in 22.00”. But we still covered a few topics (Google Cloud, Eric Schmidt, Pilots) from our none too private studio in the corridor at the Venetian!–Matthew Holt
Being Human
The human connection is threatened by medicine’s increasingly reductive focus on data collection, algorithms, and information transaction.
If you follow digital health, Rachel King’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on Stanford physician Abraham Verghese should be required reading, as it succinctly captures the way compassionate, informed physicians wrestle with emerging technologies — especially the electronic medical record.
For starters, Verghese understands its appeal: “The electronic medical record is a wonderful thing, in general, a huge improvement on finding paper charts and finding the old records and trying to put them all together.”
At the same, he accurately captures the problem: “The downside is that we’re spending too much time on the electronic medical record and not enough at the bedside.”
This tension is not unique to digital health, and reflects a more general struggle between technologists who emphasize the efficient communication of discrete data, and others (humanists? Luddites?) who worry that in the reduction of complexity to data, something vital may be lost.
Technologists, it seems, tend to view activities like reading and medicine as fundamentally data transactions. So it makes sense to receive reading information electronically on your Kindle — what could be more efficient?