The Digital Doctor

Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age

By: Robert Wachter

Narrated by: Benjamin Wachter

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply wrong. 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?

Logically enough, we've pinned the problems on clunky software, flawed implementations, absurd regulations, and bad karma. It was all of those things, but it was also something far more complicated...and far more interesting.

The Digital Doctor examines health care at the dawn of its computer age. It tackles the hard questions, from how technology is changing care at the bedside to whether government intervention has been useful or destructive, and it does so with clarity, insight, humor, and compassion.

"We need to recognize that computers in health care don't simply replace my doctor's scrawl with Helvetica 12", writes the author Dr. Robert Wachter. "Instead, they transform the work, the people who do it, and their relationships with each other and with patients.... Sure, we should have thought of this sooner. But it's not too late to get it right."

This riveting audiobook offers the prescription for getting it right.

©2015 Robert Wachter (P)2015 Robert Wachter

interesting and informative

I enjoyed who I was able to get a vicariously perspective from an medical professional that understands the ever challenging state of healthcare and technological advances.

This book probably going to change my career

Dr. Wachter is a visionary. Future of healthIT is amazing. Every chapter is well written and very well narrated. It's a must read book for modern era physicians.

Nailed it

I currently work as a Chief Medical Informatics Officer at a community health system, and I can tell you that Robert Wachter absolutely nailed it with this book. Very engaging, well written, and he gives a full voice to all aspects of the challenges healthcare is now facing. I usually have difficulty explaining what I do for a living to people not in healthcare, but now I can point them to The Digital Doctor and explain to them ... It's way worse than you think!

Still relevant!

Years after the adoption of electronic medical records it still amazes me as to relevantcy of a book on technology, like this one is, can be. If flying cars are still not an everyday day occurrence as predicted a half a century ago, I can only imagine much of the content contained in these pages will be with us continuing to ponder for a very long time. Worth the time invested to listen to this book, especially as some of our perspective is now based on driving ahead while looking at the rear view mirror.

Spot on

An honest Doctor POV about the current climate & trajectory of healthcare. A must read for anyone working on healthcare transformation.