
Speaking with the digital doctor: Q&A series with Robert Wachter
If we were asked to create a list of the most compelling healthcare IT books of 2015, Robert Wachter’s The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age would be in the running for the number one position. His book offers a plain-spoken, and utterly convincing argument that healthcare IT is in its infancy, and without guidance and proper balance of patience, common sense and compassion, it will grow into a member of our society who harms, rather than helps, others.
I plan to conduct three interviews with Dr. Wachter. Below is the record of our first conversation. Our follow-up interviews will be posted in the coming weeks.
(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)
Free: Let’s start our conversation by discussing your experiences investigating how vendors impact the use of healthcare IT.

Wachter: I had a chance to spend a fair amount of time with vendors, and they’re smart people. I think we’re pinning a lot of our disappointment on them. Some of that, I think, is correct. Some of them have not done as good of a job as they should. Some of that is not their fault. When, for example, I looked at why the physician’s note has become such a disaster as a bloated piece of mostly unhelpful check boxes and confusion, I came to recognize that we’ve asked the vendors to solve ten different problems in the same space. Problems that they didn’t create. Again, for example, the note has to serve about ten different masters and vendors can only do so much with their limited exposure to the field. I do have some sympathy for their predicament.
Part of these differences stems from the fact that the traditions of the medical and aviation fields are different. Part of the difference is that Boeing and Airbus build their entire ecosystem. That would be like if Epic and Cerner ran the hospitals. They don’t. It’s much more difficult for vendors in healthcare to bring in the end-users and actually see, not just what the interface looks like, but how it is actually going to be used in real life, and in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at 3:00 am with sick patients and alerts going off every two seconds. What’s that going to feel like?
That consideration for the user is the most important thing that the vendor community must make as they conduct their work. They must get out into the field, and see how their tools are really working in real-life situations. If they do that, they will build better, more effective tools. Part of the backlash you’re hearing from clinical users of tools is that they have the sense that the vendors have not done that, and that sense is largely correct.
Free: Some would argue that you are putting too much of the responsibility of the effectiveness of healthcare It on the vendors. How would you respond to that claim?
Wachter: I am a believer in the notion that every system gets the results that it’s designed to get.
When you look at the world of the vendors, for companies like Epic and Cerner, the big guys, they’ve been here for 20, 30, or 40 years, toiling away before there was a market. Twenty-five years after the first electronic medical records (EMRs), only 5 or 10 percent of hospitals or doctor’s office had an EMR. It was unbelievably slow adoption.
We know from the history of technology in other fields that you need an iterative process as you build your system. It should be understood that everything you create is as good as you can make it at that moment, both because of the technology and how you’re thinking about it changes over time and these changes impact how smart you get. Things get better because of the user feedback and user push back that occurs during the iterative process. You try it again and again. Eventually, on version 73, it kind of works.
This is such an interesting moment in healthcare because, after a lot of hurry up and wait for a generation, all of a sudden because of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act’s (HITECH’s) incentive, we went digital pretty quickly. You didn’t hear doctors moaning about their computers five years ago because they didn’t have computers. Now everybody does, and everybody says, “Wow, this is not what I expected,” and “This is not very good.”
Could they have made it better? Should they have made it better? Yes and yes. But we are where we are and, going forward, we have to figure out a process where the feedback that the end users are giving is not dismissed as being the feedback of dinosaurs or people who are out of touch.
The vednors – Epic, Cerner, Athena – need to get out there. See how your tools are really working in the wild with doctors and nurses trying to do important work. You do that and, in time, we will see wonderful developments in improving patient care and lowering costs. If not, we are in for more of the same, or worse.
interoperability, Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age