The REAL Ghostbusters

And by "Real Ghostbusters" I mean, "Orientation". The real orientation. Which starts tomorrow.

The last two days were spent sitting in front of a computer screen learning the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system that my hospital uses. It's comprehensive. There are no physical patient charts - all the information is neatly (but somewhat complicatedly) stored in the EMR system. I won't be "writing" orders, notes or history and physicals (H&P's) - I'll be typing them all up. There are of course positives and negatives to this.

The positive is that everything is very easily accessible, quick (once you're proficient at it), supremely organized for the purposes of having accurate records which of course impacts patient care positively, helps conduct research, and is a cutting edge instrument in holding health care professionals accountable for EVERYTHING. For example (and this is true), if you pick your nose while signed into the system, it records that you picked your nose at such and such time, at such and such place, while signed into such and such patient's chart - and in fact tells you the velocity with which whatever finger you used approached your nostril - all of which could possibly be construed as inattentiveness to the case of the patient.

Imagine the court scene.

"Your honor, I submit before the jury the fact that Dr. Brown - as the Electronic Medical Record clearly shows - was picking his nose at an incredible rate of 14 picks/minute. Let me ask you this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury... is it possible - even in the slightest - that a man, nay, any human, nay even goat, could concentrate on even the most mundane tasks while picking his or her or its nose at such an unthinkable speed, let alone on the complex medical case of Mrs. Rinkadink and her multiple paper cuts???"

And of course the disadvantage of having everything on Electronic Medical Records is the same disadvantage we all face in having everything in our lives computerized. One day, when our computers become smarter than us and consequently take over the world, they/it (?) will have access to all of our health records and financial information - traditionally two of the most private components of an individual's life. Also we shouldn't forget that our modern lives as we know it are completely dependent on the computer systems we have set up to manage it - business and all its aspects, banking, transport, electricity, water and other utilities, etc would all collapse or implode or turn pink or whatever if our computers took over. Or quite simply if a "computer system" broke down, or the internet caught a cold or something along those lines.

Well, thank God that probably won't happen in the near future - until then we just have the government and insurance companies to worry about.

On a more serious note - as if residency itself wouldn't be enough of a mesmerizing spiral of to-do lists - sitting in front of a computer screen, everything relating to patient care being taken care of by an endless series of clicks and clacks, only adds to the distance from our own humanity that paradoxically tends to occur during this time of a physician's training. Surrounded by suffering, we first put up barriers to allow ourselves to function properly (or else if we ran out of saline we could just cry some bags up on a daily basis), and then the nature of residency itself, embedded in the time demands of the current health care system, serve to take us further and further from the world of the heart that should underly every interaction with a patient.

Watch that idealism leak out of my ears faster than we can bomb another brown-person country.

For me, on a more personal note, keeping the big picture in mind is hard enough. Maybe my super-fast mouse clicking during residency will make it harder than if I had to slow down a bit and actually take out a pen. Or maybe not. Probably not.

Maybe this whole entry was just another soul's muffled cry against the coldness of modernity.