Bob Wachter
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
fewer than one in 10 American hospitals or doctor's offices had an electronic health record.
By 2016, fewer than one in 10 did not.
In the space of a very short amount of time, we went from basically a paper-based industry where the idea of using advanced data analytics and machine learning and all that was impossible because all the data was on pieces of paper to an industry that had its information in digital form.
What was disappointing about that was many of us, including me, naively thought that's the ballgame.
If we get our data in digital form, we'll be ready to innovate and do all this stuff like Amazon and Netflix and Apple and medicine will be better and safer and cheaper.
The lesson that I took from that era was a term coined by Eric Bernoffson at Stanford called the productivity paradox of IT.
The idea that you take some fancy new information technology, you bring it into an industry and snap your fingers and you will quickly transform the industry to make it better and more productive.
But that almost never happens.
And the paradox is it looks so good on the PowerPoint slides, the ads that were used to sell it to us.
It doesn't work, and it doesn't work partly because the technology needs to get better and all the iterative versions 12.7 need to happen.
But much more importantly, the industry needs to transform the way it thinks about its work, organizes itself, the culture, the governance.
In 2012, JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a crayon drawing—probably the first time I'd ever did that—from a seven-year-old girl who went in to see her pediatrician.
What it shows is the girl sitting on the exam table, mom's next to her, sister's in the corner, and in the other corner of the room is the doctor with his back to the patient, typing away—
It's a beautiful drawing.
There's one thing the girl got wrong, which is she portrayed the doctors having a smile on his face.