Robert Wachter Quotes & Sayings

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. — Robert Wachter

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. — 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. — Robert Wachter

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

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body: The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

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

And for a personal health record to be truly transformative, it will need to be far more than a passive window into the medical record, with a scheduling and medication refill module tacked on. It will have to be dynamic, engaging, and capable of interacting with patients and families in ways that ultimately lead to better health. While Google and Microsoft were trying to find ways to give patients direct access to their records via the Web, others have focused on what might seem to be an easier problem: sharing records between — Robert Wachter

All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it's not intuitive and if the end user can't use it. — Robert Wachter

the congressional ban on the universal patient identifier the single biggest failure in the history of health IT legislation. — Robert Wachter

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 — Robert Wachter

You've probably played that parlor game in which you fantasize about what it would be like to have a drink with one of the great figures in history. Perhaps — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

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

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 — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

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

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. — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

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 — Robert Wachter

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

more data-driven, automated healthcare will displace up to 80 percent of physicians' diagnostic and prescription work."12 — Robert Wachter

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 — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter

61% of physicians felt their EHR improved the quality of care they delivered to patients, but only 1 in 3 said it had improved their job satisfaction, and 1 in 5 said they would go back to paper if they could.

Tellingly, the more advanced the EHR; for example, systems that offered reminders, alerts, and messaging capability, the greater the unhappiness. — Robert Wachter

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. — Robert Wachter