My husband’s in the hospital (he’s going to be ok) for the foreseeable or the next couple of days, whichever comes first, and I’m there with him. In a hospital, you give up control — for excellent reasons — and you haven’t a clue about what’s next. Even if I were granted a clue, I wouldn’t know what to do with it: there should be an essay in the effects on the brain of stress but my brain’s under stress and the neurons aren’t speaking to each other, let alone operating well enough to think through an essay. Another time, maybe. Meanwhile, I’m reduxing a medical-world post about doctors and computers, so click on it if you’d like.
After that post was published, I sent it to my husband’s doctor and she sent it to other doctors and after that, nothing more was heard. But ever since, I’ve continued to ask doctors informally whether they like using those computers and the responses vary from “I’m getting used to it,” to “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”
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illustration: 1915 By: Frederick Henry Townsend, via Wellcome Images
I recently visited my PCP and noticed something that hadn’t sunk in before. He was taking notes in long hand. I expressed my surprise, and he said his group of doctors had decided to let each do his own preference on record keeping. He said that their initial finding was that those (mostly younger) who used electronic records actually lost money as a subset. His group hasn’t really decided how to comply. For one thing, he said, the financial penalties for noncompliance were less than the loss of revenue resulting from compliance.