So often when I am giving demonstrations of our e-prescribing software, I am asked questions like “can it do this,” “can it do that?” Many times the question goes something like this, “If my patient is a 29 year old female with brown hair and long fingernails and I am considering prescribing a medication that will turn her hair purple, will it tell me that the patient doesn’t like purple hair because she can’t find purple nail polish?” My response: “Um…er…hmmm…well…no. It won’t do that.” Then I go on to ask “How do you know that now, that your client doesn’t like purple hair?” They respond, “Well, I have to ask her.”

 

Okay, so I’m being a bit outrageous, but I hope you see my point. Technology is wonderful and it can do many, many things. However, there is a point where clinicians need to be clinicians and use their training and skills. It takes many years of education and training to become a physician or other type of prescriber. If technology could do everything, including think and made clinical judgments on behalf of the physician, I suspect more people would become physicians.

 

Society has always had and continues to have great respect for physicians for their expertise in keeping us well. I doubt we’ll ever have (or want to have) that much respect for a computer application.