Wachter Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Robert Wachter

#4. 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

#5. Family, can't live with them, can't orbitally bombard them back to the foul, oozing proto-plasma they crawled out of,

Luke Sky Wachter

#6. 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

#7. Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

Anatole France

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Math people are math people. When you approach them with investments and business, they don't just ask the soft questions but eventually get to the hard questions.

Paul Wachter

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

Robert Wachter

#12. 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

#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. The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.

Chuck Klosterman

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. My father ran a famous L.A. nightclub complete with roller-rink - Flippers - in the early Eighties which was the West Coast's answer to Studio 54.

Liberty Ross

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

Robert Wachter

#19. Cafe society is as old as the hills. Starbucks and its imitators are the coffee face of the new man in a hurry.

Ian Anderson

#20. 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

#21. Feeling unsure and lost is part of your path. Don't avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it.

Louis C.K.

#22. People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

Patti Smith

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Robert Wachter

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

Robert Wachter

#27. What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds than what is presented to the trustworthy eye.

Horace

#28. 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

#29. Go where you add value. Don't look for places where you're just like everybody else.

Paul Wachter

#30. See, whoever said I was an autocrat was clearly mistaken. I represented the height of representative democracy where everyone gets a vote. Mine just counted for more than all the other ones combined, when you read the final tally; that's all.

Luke Sky Wachter

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

Robert Wachter

#32. 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