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Distracted Doctoring pp 5–16Cite as

Medicine Enters the Computer Age

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Abstract

The electronic health record (EHR) has been cast as the archvillain in many of the narratives about modern medicine ranging from dehumanization to overregulation. Commentators from the worlds of medicine, business, politics, and computer science have all blamed the EHR for their choice of problems in order to propose their own cures. The ubiquity of these narratives can help us forget how recently EHRs were both heralded and rare and the fascinatingly, maddeningly speedy arrival of the current moment. The computer age came for medicine slowly, piecemeal, and with great resistance—until it occurred all at once. In this chapter, we explore the twists and turns and fits and starts by which medicine tiptoed across a digital chasm that most other industries had long crossed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Lekshmi Santhosh MD

  2. Division of Hospital Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Raman Khanna MD

Authors
  1. Lekshmi Santhosh MD
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  2. Raman Khanna MD
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Correspondence to Raman Khanna MD .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rochester Medical Center, Pittsford, New York, USA

    Peter J. Papadakos

  2. Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, The University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

    Stephen Bertman

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Santhosh, L., Khanna, R. (2017). Medicine Enters the Computer Age. In: Papadakos, P., Bertman, S. (eds) Distracted Doctoring. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48707-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48707-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48706-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48707-6

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