The digital doctor
For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills, yet medicine stubbornly resisted computerization-- until now. Thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital. Wachter examines healthcare at the dawn of its computer age, and shows how technology is changing care at the bedside. He questions whether government intervention has been useful or destructive-- and does so with clarity, insight, humor, and compassion.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2016–2022years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Only tangently related, but I strongly encourage anyone who has interest in learning more about the state of the industry and how technology relates to it read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Doctor-Hope-Medicines-Compute...
- You might find Robert Wachter's The Digital Doctor interesting, although it focuses on the big picture more than specific examples: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5I9A0/
- You are correct. Robert Wachter has written a lot on this (see his The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age) and it's a common error to simply blame someone like a nurse for administering the incorrect medicine as opposed to seeing how that situation came to be. Healthcare has a lot to learn from how similar things are investigated in the aviation industry (note: that doesn't mean nurses get absolved of everything, just that even apparently insanely stupid mistakes are often the result of swiss-cheese style errors).
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