I know a wise old forester. Ask him any question and he’ll answer, “Well, now, it depends on what you want.”
“Should we clear this underbrush or just leave it?” It depends on what you want.
I realize this can explain any choice we’ve made: that is, we have what we have because, at some level, that’s what we want. In that light, let me discuss electronic medical records.
EMRs can be wonderfully useful. You can not only record acres of information legibly, but can retrieve it from anywhere in the world. Indeed, this is an important advance in the science of health care. But EMRs are not helping health care’s art.
I recently examined a patient’s chart, looking for notes about her emotions while hospitalized, and the effects of her visitors. Usually, this would be in the nursing notes. But all I found was page after page of generic computer printout.
It depends on what you want. If you want nurses to input more and more data by checking multiple-choice boxes instead taking the time to write a few sentences, you’ll write the EMR software accordingly. Just hit “alt-S,” and the program prints out an avalanche of, well, stuff. A visiting anthropologist reading this chart might not even recognize that it describes a human being.
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