American doctors are rich and miserable
Doctors are particularly aggrieved by the rise of electronic health records. Studies show that family doctors spend, on average, just under an hour every day answering patient messages alone. The use of remote-contact and communication apps spiked during the covid pandemic, reports Tait Shanafelt, a doctor at Stanford who studies burnout, “leading to a tsunami of inbox messages for physicians”. Although he emphasises their potential for improved treatment, “it’s all just extra work.”
The problem is of course much wider. Within clinic electronic records have reversed the ratio of clinic time talking to the patient to admin supporting the clinical encounter, from 2:1 to 1:2. Nobody yet has invented the clinical equivalent of the artist’s Photoshop or engineers CAD. Eventually, talking to patients will be deprecated, or limited to a few hundred characters in a textbox field.