Robert Wachter Quotes

#1. many people criticize Meaningful Use and HIPAA for being too much and too rigid, others criticize the ONC for being too lax in certain areas. The

Robert Wachter

#2. if Watson is going to replace any physicians, it will likely be at the low end of complexity - for

Robert Wachter

#3. We have Dragon [dictation software]," one primary care doctor said, "which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] 'Patient's prostate is bothering him' and it turned out 'Patient's prostitute is bothering him.

Robert Wachter

#4. more data-driven, automated healthcare will displace up to 80 percent of physicians' diagnostic and prescription work."12

Robert Wachter

#5. Smart Patients and other online communities are demonstrating that patients can learn a tremendous amount from one another.

Robert Wachter

#6. You've probably played that parlor game in which you fantasize about what it would be like to have a drink with one of the great figures in history. Perhaps

Robert Wachter

#7. Patients possess a body of knowledge about themselves that we can never hope to master, and we have a body of knowledge about medicine that they can never hope to master. Our job is to bring these two groups together so we can serve each other well.

Robert Wachter

#8. It shouldn't surprise you, then, that notes written by internists read like novellas (ones in which we're paid by the word), while a colleague of mine jokes that a typical post-op surgical note reads something like "Feeling well and doing swell.

Robert Wachter

#9. it is this integration between the worlds of the patient and the clinician that carries the most promise.

Robert Wachter

#10. All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it's not intuitive and if the end user can't use it.

Robert Wachter

#11. While someday the computerization of medicine will surely be that long-awaited "disruptive innovation," today it's often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, of clinicians' professional interactions and work flow, and of the way we measure and try to improve things. I

Robert Wachter

#12. Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the technology works.

Robert Wachter

#13. I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively.

Robert Wachter

#14. Informatics is the field of medicine that concerns itself with "the interactions among and between humans and information tools and systems." In 2013, it became an official specialty, like cardiology or obstetrics, with its own board certification.

Robert Wachter

#15. McGlynn EA, Asch SM, Adams J, et al. The quality of health care delivered to adults in the United States.

Robert Wachter

#16. Emergency department physicians spent 44 percent of their time entering data into electronic medical records, clicking up to 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift. - Becker's Health IT & CIO Review magazine, October 11, 2013

Robert Wachter

#17. to tackle the problem of healthcare costs effectively, we'll need a system in which "everyone is practicing at the top of their license.

Robert Wachter

#18. James Reason reminds us, "Errors are largely unintentional. It is very difficult for management to control what people did not intend to do in the first place.

Robert Wachter

#19. If you do a single thing - and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing - you should put a 'Welcome, Robots!' doormat outside your office," wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. "They're coming for you.

Robert Wachter

#20. the congressional ban on the universal patient identifier the single biggest failure in the history of health IT legislation.

Robert Wachter

#21. If we go into the visit with both parties knowing what's going on, then we can spend the visit talking about what we do about it.

Robert Wachter