Why Doctors’ Screen Time Could Be Bad for Your Health
FOR SEVERAL YEARS I HAVE ASKED PEOPLE “Why, in your appointment with your doctor, is his or her back turned to you, working on a computer?” The common answers: “She’s writing down my words to remember them,” “He’s ordering tests” or “To get me better health care.”
No, no and no: the primary purpose of the computer is billing. The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is essentially a cash register. It was developed by technocrats as part of a mandate of the Obama administration in 2008 to help make medical records more efficient. It was a good idea: to make all clinical data from a patient’s medical history readily available electronically to doctors and other health care workers. It would have worked, if it were used only for that.
But somehow the for-profit insurance industry got into the EMR and linked the medical data part tightly to
