Page 22 - HCMA January Feb 2020

Poet’s Corner
Digital Disaster
Richard England, MD
EHR is a disaster
what have I said
a recent Fortune magazine article, April 2019, page 56 to 70
“Death by a Thousand Clicks”
states that medical errors
are the third leading cause of death in this country, many of these caused by this ‘miraculous’ system mandated in 2010 by our
Blackberry President Obama
Now 36 billion dollars later
these systems are still causing
irreparable harm;
information is lost or failed to be recorded and not sent to the people
that it is supposed to help, physicians and patients.
Orders are not carried out; information is not being transmitted.
These supposedly beneficial electronic medical records have also caused more physician ‘burnout’ than most people want to talk about. We want to hide it somewhere
and disguise it by offering counselling to the affected physicians. The time spent working on
computer records is not rewarding
and forces many into other jobs or depression and worsened patient care. Older physicians saw the future
and just chose to retire.
How often does your physician look at you while seeing him in the office?
Usually he is too busy
pushing buttons on his keyboard; nurses spend hours of their precious time on computers instead of checking their patients. Out of every 11 hours of work
a doctors types 5.9 hours into the laptop and 5.1 hours with patients.
Vice president Biden tried to get his son’s records concerning his glioblastoma and even he was unable to obtain these in 2016;
he had to admit that
the system was a failure.
Medicare needs to set up
a system that documents
the number of treatment errors caused by these defective programs so that it can work on
a way to correct them.
HELP ELECT PHYSICIAN-FRIENDLY CANDIDATES!
It is of utmost importance that all physicians become pro-active and support “friends of medicine.” HILLPAC (Hillsborough Political Action Committee) conducts interviews and will support the campaigns of pro-medicine candidates.
Please join HILLPAC today - Annual dues are $100 Mail your contribution to:
HILLPAC
c/o Hillsborough County Medical Association, Inc. 606 S. Boulevard
Tampa, Florida 33606
Or securely donate online: https://hcma.net/join-renew/
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HCMA BULLETIN, Vol 65, No. 5 – January/February 2020