The problems with government mandated healthcare technology

See ‘A Giant Leap’ Review: Disruption for Doctors: Digital innovation in healthcare has proceeded in fits and starts. Will generative artificial intelligence solve more problems than it creates? by David A. Shaywitz. He is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

He reviewed the book A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future by Robert Wachter. Excerpts:

"Health-policy wonks in the Obama administration tucked $30 billion into the 2009 stimulus package to accelerate EHR adoption, a move that had unanticipated consequences. The problem, Dr. Wachter points out, was that EHRs provide a mechanism for “hospital administrators, regulators, and payors” to “shape what the doctor did in real time,” generating ever more tasks requiring ever more documentation.

The introduction of patient-communication portals added another burden, creating a torrent of messages with “no workforce, workflow, or business model to sustain it,” and forcing doctors to work increasingly late hours. Healthcare systems responded by hiring more administrative staff to manage the paperwork, and more nurse practitioners to take on clinical tasks."

"He offers a useful outline of digital transformation: digitization, integration, analysis and finally acting on insights to change behavior. He argues that healthcare remains maddeningly stuck at Step 2, as practitioners struggle to connect siloed information. Such work can be “brutally difficult,” he writes, because “trying to get data from health systems or insurers often feels like dragging an anchor through the sand.”"