The New York Times Science Bestseller 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.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: On Call
Chapter 2: Shovel Ready
PART ONE: The Note
Chapter 3: The iPatient
Chapter 4: The Note
Chapter 5: Strangers at the Bedside
Chapter 6: Radiology Rounds
Chapter 7: Go Live
Chapter 8: Unanticipated Consequences
PART TWO: Decisions and Data
Chapter 9: Can Computers Replace the Physician's Brain?
Chapter 10: David and Goliath
Chapter 11: Big Data
PART THREE: The Overdose
Chapter 12: The Error
Chapter 13: The System
Chapter 14: The Doctor
Chapter 15: The Pharmacist
Chapter 16: The Alerts
Chapter 17: The Robot
Chapter 18: The Nurse
Chapter 19: The Patient
PART FOUR: The Connected Patient
Chapter 20: OpenNotes
Chapter 21: Personal Health Records and Patient Portals
Chapter 22: A Community of Patients
PART FIVE: The Players and the Policies
Chapter 23: Meaningful Use
Chapter 24: Epic and Athena
Chapter 25: Silicon Valley Meets Healthcare
Chapter 26: The Productivity Paradox
PART SIX: Toward a Brighter Future
Chapter 27: A Vision for Health Information Technology
Chapter 28: The Nontechnological Side of Makin Heath IT Work
Chapter 29: Art and Science
Acknowledgements
Notes
National Coordinators for Heath Information Technology
People Interviewed
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
About the Author :
Robert Wachter, MD
Professor of Medicine
Associate Chair, Department of Medicine
UCSF School of Medicine
Dr. Wachter is one of the world’s true leaders in patient safety and health quality, and first author of Internal Bleeding, a trade book about patient safety that spent several weeks on the best seller lists. He is Associate Chair of one of the world’s best Internal Medicine programs. He is one of the founders and chief operators of the great health quality and safety web site, www.webmm.ahrq.gov.
