NEJM September 28, 2017
In the good old days, clinicians thought in groups; “rounding,” whether on the wards or in the radiology reading room, was a chance for colleagues to work together on problems too difficult for any single mind to solve.
Today, thinking looks very different: we do it alone, bathed in the blue light of computer screens.
Our knee-jerk reaction is to blame the computer, but the roots of this shift run far deeper. Medical thinking has become vastly more complex, mirroring changes in our patients, our health care system, and medical science. The complexity of medicine now exceeds the capacity of the human mind.
Computers, far from being the problem, are the solution. But using them to manage the complexity of...