The digital doctor : hope, hype, and harm at the dawn of medicine's computer age

For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills, yet medicine stubbornly resisted computerization-- until now. Thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital. Wachter examines healthcare at the dawn of its computer age, and shows how technology is changing care at the bedside. He questions whether government intervention has been useful or destructive-- and does so with clarity, insight, humor, and compassion. Read more... Abstract: Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with their patients? How could one of America's leading hospitals give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic, despite a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system? How could a recruiting ad for physicians tout the absence of an electronic medical record as a major selling point? Read more...