Computerization, which simplified tasks in many industries, has largely failed to achieve the same result in healthcare, causing many doctors to hate their PCs
Atul Gawande / New Yorker : Tweets: @stevesi , @atul_gawande , @muddywatersre , @jayparkinson , @jbraunmd , and @radiomorillo Tweets: Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Why Doctors Hate Their Computers http://www.newyorker.com/... // Many years ago I did a site visit at Mayo Clinic (ostensibly to see how Office could fit in) with GPs and Family Medicine doctors. This is exactly what they told me. http://twitter.com/... Atul Gawande / @atul_gawande : My latest @NewYorker piece, in gestation for a couple years now, as you'll see. Something to read about other than the election, at least. It is on the state of health care information technology. In other words: http://www.newyorker.com/.... @muddywatersre : Excellent, deep piece on how EMR has changed healthcare in unintended ways. “Revenge of ancillaries” - admins' input in sys design makes MDs jobs harder, admins' easier. Basically this explains why ur doc looks at computer more than u. http://www.newyorker.com/... Jay Parkinson / @jayparkinson : EMRs can't be fixed. The business side of healthcare hires EMRs to maximize revenue via inflated data. Doctors want to hire EMRs to minimize fluff & maximize insights. Those are diametrically opposed & EMRs can't fulfill both expectations simultaneously. http://www.newyorker.com/... Jonathan Braun / @jbraunmd : Great piece by @Atul_Gawande addressing EHRs' effects on physician wellness and the doctor-patient relationship, as well as the trade-offs in a system that “works for everyone.” https://twitter.com/... Stephanie Morillo / @radiomorillo : Must read: an article about how digitization in healthcare has actually increased doctors' workloads and has led to burnout and depression in healthcare professionals. A fascinating read for anyone interested in usability and enterprise software. https://www.newyorker.com/... pic.twitter.com/2xWMb7md9Y
Context & Ripple Effects
Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece lands at the start of a run of coverage interrogating health-care software: weeks later came a profile of Epic Systems, the Wisconsin vendor claiming medical records for more than half of US patients, and then a report that the US has spent $36B digitizing health records while logging thousands of deaths and injuries tied to software glitches.
The through-line is that digitization changed where clinicians' time goes rather than reducing it — and later reporting on AI in health care underdelivering because medical data is complex and scarce raises the question of whether the next layer of software fixes that or inherits it.
First-order effects
- Physicians absorb the direct cost: electronic records shift clerical work onto doctors, feeding the burnout and resentment Gawande documents, while Epic — holding records for over half of US patients — owns the workflow those doctors are stuck in.
Second-order effects
- Hospitals and vendors face pressure to buy back clinician time, which is exactly the opening for the Microsoft–Mayo Clinic plan to build an AI assistant and clinician tools trained on Mayo's medical data, and for Mayo's radiology deployments meant to amplify human capacity.
Third-order effects
- If AI is layered onto records systems that already increased workloads and produced glitch-related harm, it risks compounding documented failure modes like overtesting and overdiagnosis — pushing regulators and buyers toward judging health software by its effect on clinician time and patient safety, not adoption rates.
The trend: Health-care computing is moving from digitizing records to automating clinician work, with the unresolved question being whether AI relieves or reproduces the documentation burden that made doctors hate their computers.