Why Doctors Hate Their Computers by Atul Gawande via The New Yorker

A fascinating look at technology’s influence on doctors (based on years of experience by a well-renowned doctor).

First, there’s the realization that some of the constraints prior to digitalization were actually beneficial:

piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when [we] had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters.

That’s when you start to realize that technology has its benefits, but you likely traded one set of problems for another. For doctors, apparently technology is becoming so overbearing that we’re hiring for jobs which didn’t exist to handle the computerization of everything:

We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans [to complete computer-related tasks].

Which results in us humans acting like robots in order to fulfill the requirements of the systems we built:

Many fear that the advance of technology will replace us all with robots. Yet in fields like health care the more imminent prospect is that it will make us all behave like robots”

The author’s solution?

We can retune and streamline our systems, but we won’t find a magical sweet spot between competing imperatives. We can only insure that people always have the ability to turn away from their screens and see each other, colleague to colleague, clinician to patient, face to face.