I have never minded spending any amount of time when a patient needed me or to do anything that bettered patient care. I am sure that none of you have ever minded being awakened at night by a patient who was ill and needed attention: hey, we’re ObGyns. I would not object to spending any amount of time on the conversion to an electronic medical records (EMR) system if I thought it would really benefit patient care. But I am convinced that it does not.

I knew that I would have problems with our new electronic medical record (EMR) system on the first day of training. The initial training was conducted by a programmatic, not medically trained “yuppette” from the IT Department, who extolled to a 60-year-old Mac user the wonders of the EMR system: you should right click here, single click there (oops, don’t double click!), and then enter some esoteric bit of medical history.