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Are IT Techniques Hurting Medical Care?

A physician and medical informatics specialist brings forward the belief that standard IT techniques, as applied to Healthcare Information Systems,

Problems created by lack of scientific rigor in a cross disciplinary, exploratory field such as HIT, which should be guided by the most rigorous scientific principles, are increasing in scope and severity. In fact, I believe medicine is suffering an unhelpful “cross occupational invasion” by the IT industry, with the IT industry’s best interests as the primary driver, not medicine’s...

Ominously, there is a lot of advantage to be had with terabytes of uncontrolled data and a political agenda. I fear that what may come from CER that draws upon uncontrolled Electronic Health Record data will be politics masquerading as science. Under such conditions, private practitioners, medical innovators, the pharmaceutical industry, and patients are all in jeopardy.


The Syndrome of Inappropriate Overconfidence in Computing: An Invasion of Medicine by the Information Technology Industry? Read the whole thing.

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