Op-ed: EHRs, AI are making medicine, imaging impersonal—but physicians are to blame
In a May 16 editorial published by The New York Times Magazine, Abraham Verghese, MD, a professor of internal medicine at Stanford University, explained that the popularity of electronic health records (EHRs) and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine may be overriding physicians' clinical judgement more than informing it.
Unfortunately, he argues, physicians are becoming more vulnerable to self-doubt in the face of technologic advancement—and physicians are to blame.
"In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer; that virtual entity gets all our attention" Verghese wrote. "The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? What are they doing? Hello! It’s my body, you know!"
Verghese acknowledged that the EHR and AI have greatly reduced medical errors, advanced pattern recognition in imaging and transcended geographic barriers. But machine medicine will never be comparable to the value of human care and a physician's true clinical judgement, he wrote.
"True clinical judgment is more than addressing the avalanche of blood work, imaging and lab tests; it is about using human skills to understand where the patient is in the trajectory of a life and the disease, what the nature of the patient’s family and social circumstances is and how much they want done," he wrote.
Read the full piece at the New York Times Magazine:
A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.