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Why doctors hate their computers (2018)

Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients?

Many of the angriest complaints, however, were due to problems rooted in what Sumit Rana, a senior vice-president at Epic, called “the Revenge of the Ancillaries.” In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. Years before, a graduate student had written a program, called Fluidity, that allowed the research group to run computer simulations of small-scale fluid dynamics—specifically, ones related to the challenge of safely transporting radioactive materials for nuclear reactors. “It is for the patients.” While some sixty thousand staff members use the system, almost ten times as many patients log into it to look up their lab results, remind themselves of the medications they are supposed to take, read the office notes that their doctor wrote in order to better understand what they’ve been told.

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