A Letter to the Doctors and Nurses
In this incredible, short letter, a young man reminds us what outstanding healthcare is all about. Caring not only for our (sometimes critically ill) patients, but also their spouses, their families, sometimes even their cat! Don’t miss this.
This puts into perspective our efforts in Healthcare Information Technology. In my view, the world is changing quickly. Technology improves. Software improves. Regulations … well, don’t improve, they change, they increase. Someone said Change is easy, until you change something I care about. Yes.
So often, our EHR efforts are met with resistance. We are often the face of Change to our physicians and nurses. We should remember, this letter links us back to our common goal, caring for patients, easing their suffering. I recall hearing the saying, in healthcare: To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.
Others have written about the 20 percent physician (caution: huge 100+ page pdf), and I have had my worries about IBM’s Watson or other machine learning devices coming to take my job.
In my ideal world, the perfect EHR works behind the scenes to improve quality, safety, but otherwise disappears, and allows human connection and caring. This is our aspiration. Thank you Peter DeMarco, and your wife, for reminding us of the best of ourselves.
I’m gratified that the public conversation on electronic (and also paper) medical records continues. Its a dry topic, but oh so important. Ms. Sanger-Katz writes about Casey Quinlan (and her QR code!), and the difficulty of assembling a longitudinal health record that becomes more important as we get older. The morass of privacy, mistrust, bureaucracy, swiss-cheese implementation of EHR (electronic health records) with few electronic connections, throw numerous barriers into this journey. 
Well, I’m not sure what to think. I read this because of my book club, where we read Juan Thompson’s book “Stories I tell Myself”. He’s Hunter’s son, and writes well in his own right (and, works in Healthcare IT in Denver!). Moreover, this was an opportunity for me to read some literature of the Gonzo generation that I never got around to. Juan mentioned the lyricism of Hunter’s description of being on motorcycle barreling down Pacific Coast Highway at midnight. This prompted me to pull Hell’s Angels off my wife’s bookshelf, and then I was hooked.
