What you don’t know can kill you.  Back in the day, banks were sweating how to get machines to replace people in their back offices.  Had they not done so successfully, it would’ve been impossible to operate the way they do now on such a mind blowing transaction processing scale.  But they didn’t start out doing so good.  There were data integrity issues and system inter-operability issues.  It was panic time.  With the incentive to get inventive, they fixed it.

The exact same kind of core computer incompetence in Electronic Health Records (EHR) threatens to kill you and everyone you know.  Data integrity and inter-operability issues mean we’ve booked a trip up shit’s creek without a paddle.  Read all about “Death by a Thousand Clicks” from Kaiser Health News.  Fair warning.  This is a long read and gets kind of repetitive by the end.

It kind of seems like we should put a mender to this EHR blender.  If banks could do it 40 years ago, why the fuck don’t we get our act together?  You’d think it would be a no brainer to postpone our own funerals.

Maybe the officials we elect will put doing their job in their bucket list with fucking for campaign donations and dancing to the tune of puppets on a string.  The system might be rotten to its core, but that doesn’t mean we have to dig our own graves.

REFERENCES

1. “Death by 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong” by Fred Schulte and Erika Fry, Fortune March 18, 2019 in Kaiser Health News:  https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand-clicks/?te=1&nl=morning-briefing&emc=edit_NN_p_20190319&section=whatElse.
2. “Copy, Paste, Legislate” by Rob O’Dell and Nick Penzenstadler in USA Today on April 3, 2019: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/04/03/abortion-gun-laws-stand-your-ground-model-bills-conservatives-liberal-corporate-influence-lobbyists/3162173002/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20190404&silverid=MzEwMTU3NTgzMDE3S0.