Quotes from Robert Wachter

One of the great challenges in healthcare technology is that medicine is at once an enormous business and an exquisitely human endeavor; it requires the ruthless efficiency of the modern manufacturing plant and the gentle hand-holding of the parish priest; it is about science, but also about art; it is eminently quantifiable and yet stubbornly not.

I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively.

Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the technology works.

Doctors think they are more important in their patients' lives than their patients do.

The modern patient safety movement replaces "the blame and shame game" with an approach known as systems thinking. This paradigm acknowledges the human condition—namely, that humans err—and concludes that safety depends on creating systems that anticipate errors and either prevent or catch them before they cause harm. Such an approach has been the cornerstone of safety improvements in other high-risk industries but has been ignored in medicine until the past decade.

James Reason reminds us, "Errors are largely unintentional. It is very difficult for management to control what people did not intend to do in the first place.

While someday the computerization of medicine will surely be that long-awaited "disruptive innovation," today it's often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, of clinicians' professional interactions and work flow, and of the way we measure and try to improve things. I

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. —Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1717–1797)

Patients possess a body of knowledge about themselves that we can never hope to master, and we have a body of knowledge about medicine that they can never hope to master. Our job is to bring these two groups together so we can serve each other well.

Informatics is the field of medicine that concerns itself with "the interactions among and between humans and information tools and systems." In 2013, it became an official specialty, like cardiology or obstetrics, with its own board certification.

to tackle the problem of healthcare costs effectively, we'll need a system in which "everyone is practicing at the top of their license.

if Watson is going to replace any physicians, it will likely be at the low end of complexity—for

Emergency department physicians spent 44 percent of their time entering data into electronic medical records, clicking up to 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift. —Becker's Health IT & CIO Review magazine, October 11, 2013

If we go into the visit with both parties knowing what's going on, then we can spend the visit talking about what we do about it.

Smart Patients and other online communities are demonstrating that patients can learn a tremendous amount from one another.

We have Dragon [dictation software]," one primary care doctor said, "which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] 'Patient's prostate is bothering him' and it turned out 'Patient's prostitute is bothering him.

it is this integration between the worlds of the patient and the clinician that carries the most promise.

McGlynn EA, Asch SM, Adams J, et al. The quality of health care delivered to adults in the United States.

It shouldn't surprise you, then, that notes written by internists read like novellas (ones in which we're paid by the word), while a colleague of mine jokes that a typical post-op surgical note reads something like "Feeling well and doing swell.

As Stravinsky says, art is nothing more than placing limits and working against them rigorously … and if we refuse to place them … you do not have art, you have chaos, and to a large extent that's what we've had.

If you do a single thing—and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a 'Welcome, Robots!' doormat outside your office," wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. "They're coming for you.

I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it. —Clint Eastwood as "Dirty Harry," Magnum Force, 1973

many people criticize Meaningful Use and HIPAA for being too much and too rigid, others criticize the ONC for being too lax in certain areas. The

Mistakes, on the other hand, result from incorrect choices. Rather than blundering into them while we are distracted, we usually make mistakes because of insufficient knowledge, lack of experience or training, inadequate information (or inability to interpret available information properly), or applying the wrong set of rules or algorithms to a decision