Cookie Cutter

With computer being a must for patient care nowadays, our new medical interns scurried off to learn all the electronic survival skills before they started their job this month. Many times, senior and junior doctors alike aren't immune from the trend of electronic medicine. My consultant, to take but one example, asked us about the computer keyboard shortcut keys yesterday. These shortcut keys, in a nutshell, help us to navigate the computer keyboard efficiently. To cut and paste a paragraph, you can do so by simply hitting two keystrokes such as "Ctrl + C." Yeah!

I see no reason for objecting such ways to increase our productivity. I'm simply uncomfortable. Don't ask me why. In a rush to finish the task of writing discharge summary for patients, many of us champion the good news of going electronic. Presto! A few keystrokes would miraculously cut and paste from the old notes, filling the new medical notes with large blocks of texts verbatim. Same size, same order, same sentence, line after line.

Perfect? Yes and no. Simple, perhaps, but much more than that.

Whining about all these paragraph-clones (with copying and pasting identical number of sentences paragraph after paragraph) makes me sound like a stubborn Luddite who bemoans the stem cell cloning technology. Am I? The truth is… new technology is exciting, but not always. Once we doctors let this computerized cookie-cutter do the "cut and paste" job, we've seen the identical (and sometimes meaningless) repetition of patient notes during our rounds and in our clinics. A patient who has had his diabetes mellitus first diagnosed years ago will then persist, in this era of "cut and paste" cloning, to be called "fifty-year-old, newly diagnosed diabetes on dietary control" for each and every of his subsequent clinic visits.

That really bothered me. Still does.