Editor's Note
A Gadget Guy’s Take on Technology
I come from a family of gadgeteers. My father, an MIT-trained engineer, easily transitioned from the “gadgets” of his childhood in the 1920s such as toy steam engines to ham radio transceivers in the 1960s to the first IBM PC in the early ’80s. The last 20 years of his life saw a lengthening technology parade of computers, phones, fax machines, and cameras. My brother, a Stanford-trained electrical engineer, has been at the leading edge of technology since graduating from college, always staying two steps ahead of my dad and me with the latest nifty devices and serving as the Meyer family nerd. The genes traveled to my youngest son, Ramsey, a button-pusher from age 3 and now a savvy computer guy who sends me frequent technology updates and is gradually replacing my brother as the family Geek Squad agent.
Over the years, I have struggled to keep current, leaving a trail of computers, printers, PDAs, and cell phones as proof of that effort. I have tried to incorporate technology into my medical practice, but internal medicine is more high-touch than high-tech. When I joined my group in 1977, our sole piece of technology was a chest X-ray unit that was a slight upgrade from Roentgen’s original. It now adorns a room devoted to chart storage. Our doctors type their office notes using Microsoft Word; but our migration to computerized medical records has been painfully glacial. Personally, I’m a Meyer techie, but professionally, I’m a frustrated wanna-have.
So this month’s issue is a bit like window-shopping for me—electronic health records in full bloom showing their worth, smartphones finding their way into doctors’ pockets, iPads getting tested for their utility by medical students, “office” visits being done on the Internet, and spiffy portable ultrasounds adding quick, accurate diagnoses to medical office practice. Technology continues to shake up medicine, and my prediction is that more temblors likely are ahead. What social media will do for or to medical practice is more difficult to predict. Clearly, Facebook and Twitter have inundated society nationally and globally, with an estimated 500 million people posting, friending, and liking on Facebook and tweeters sharing impressions from the inane to the inspired. Businesses have embraced social media, seeing them as a way to connect to potential customers, to draw them in to a virtual club so that they won’t just buy, they’ll belong. The Mayo Clinic thinks those media are important enough for medicine to have established a social media center. And when authors Colin Segovis and Melissa Rethlefsen say the “media are designed to be open, transparent, and easy to use,” it sounds like we all should sign up.
Yet social media are not for all providers and perhaps are not for most providers. A Facebooker’s page is a digital billboard: Once you put it up, it’s there for viewing, interpretation, and perhaps misinterpretation. Most docs I know prefer to make their impact one patient at a time.
So as a confirmed gadgeteer, I see myself getting a new smartphone, investing in computerized medical records, and dabbling with new office gadgets. But for now, I’ll just friend the person in front of me.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief, can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org