One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
One downside of the information age is that the vast majority of information is useless, redundant or wrong. Google has made billions of dollars because it does a slightly better job deciding which of 100,000 entries may be marginally more relevant. Deciding what information is helpful, and what is not, is one of those things that people do better than computers, at least for now.
Medicine is no different. Huge amounts of data are generated by laboratory tests, radiological studies and physical examinations, most of which are useless. Even important studies lose value over time.
A large portion of a doctor's training is learning how to distinguish the important from the trivial. Medical residencies are so long in part because of the expertise required to make such judgments. I remember reading through hundreds of pages of patient charts in medical school, trying to distill the tiny amount of actual information needed to formulate a treatment plan. Learning these skills is not easy, and some doctors never really master the problem(they tend to become administrators).
The ability to summarize large amounts of medical information into a few understandable lines is part of what makes someone a good doctor. A limited number of well chosen words can tell you far more about a patients history and prognosis than hundreds of pages of laboratory printouts or radiology reports. “Pneumococcal pneumonia, responded to methicillin” is all one may need to know about a week long stay in the hospital.
Electronic medical records do not summarize or make distinctions. They require completeness, and must include everything, with frequent failure to exclude redundant, misleading or wrong information. Hours of time are spent entering data which doctors know has little relevance to the patients course of treatment.
Computerizing medical information so that it is readable, accessible and easy to share is a laudable goal, and will have great value. However, if it is approached as a engineering problem, without the requisite medical understanding, we will get systems that complicate, rather than simplify. Getting to the moon is far simpler than curing disease. Technology without subtlety can address some problems, but not all of them, a distinction lost on many of our leaders.
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