I mentioned in a recent post Lesa Becker’s study of the impact of computer adoption on hospital personnel. Well, I was visiting in a hospital the other day and noticed the wheeled computer the doctors were lugging around to patients’ beds, so I asked staff members whether the move to computerized patient records is a boon or a bane.

Opinions varied as to the time impact: all agreed it takes longer to use, with older folks feeling more affected than younger ones; but I was surprised with the reply of the head nurse. She replied with an emphatic condemnation of the technology, but for her it was not a matter of efficiency or more work. Her answer was short: “with a computer, you look at the screen instead of at the patient!”

This is indeed an interesting opinion, which was corroborated by the attending doctor. The computer provides a great deal of useful information about the patient, which can be shared and retrieved reliably, as another nurse had pointed out; yet at the same time it keeps the patient out of focus. In fact,  given that time spent at each bed was dictated by the hospital’s workload, I couldn’t help noticing that the doctors were spending a significant fraction of that precious time pounding the keyboard. An unexpected side effect of the race to get more information; and another proof that more information is not always necessarily better.