“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 During my visit to UCSF’s seventh-floor satellite pharmacy, I saw the pharmacists verifying many medication… — Robert Wachter Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share
“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.… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics,… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“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… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“Mistakes, on the other hand, result from incorrect choices. Rather than blundering into them while we are distracted, we usually make mistakes because of… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last. —Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1717–1797)” — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“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… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“There’s a saying in aviation that the airplane of the future will no longer have two humans in the cockpit. Instead, there will be… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“As Stravinsky says, art is nothing more than placing limits and working against them rigorously … and if we refuse to place them …… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“Informatics is the field of medicine that concerns itself with “the interactions among and between humans and information tools and systems.” In 2013, it… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“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… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“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… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“The modern patient safety movement replaces “the blame and shame game” with an approach known as systems thinking. This paradigm acknowledges the human condition—namely,… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
“James Reason reminds us, “Errors are largely unintentional. It is very difficult for management to control what people did not intend to do in… — Robert Wachter Copy Share
