The headline in the Oct. 13, 2017, Portland (Maine) Press Herald hinted that I was about to read a sad story: “New Hampshire doctor, 85, may lose practice because she doesn’t use computer.” Anna Konopka, MD, who has a 300-patient practice in New London, doesn’t use a computer in her office, and as a consequence can’t participate in her state’s mandated prescription drug monitoring program. She has appealed to the governor, but if her appeal is denied she will be forced to close her office.
The closure will present a hardship for the residents of this small New Hampshire town, who will have to replace their obviously committed physician who has served them for more than 30 years. And I am sure that Dr. Konopka would have preferred to end her professional career on her own terms. It isn’t going to be easy to give up that positive feedback from her patients that every primary care physician enjoys even on her worst day.
However, this news story is about a tragedy that extends far beyond this little college town nestled among the hills and lakes of New Hampshire. Why do you think Dr. Konopka chose not to use a computer in her office? The short 100-word news story doesn’t provide an answer. But I suspect that Dr. Konopka is not a Luddite. It is very likely that she has a computer at home. She may email her grandchildren and do some shopping on Amazon. Being 85 years old does not exclude a person from enjoying the conveniences of cyberspace.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dr. Konopka has listened to other physicians in her community complain about the cost and time-gobbling inefficiencies of their EHRs. She may have been put off by her own experiences as a patient whose physician spends too much time looking at his computer screen and fails to engage with her. Or she may have simply done the math and come up with the obvious answer that a computer system would be a bad investment for her small practice.
I suspect that there are days that you wish you had followed this wise older physician’s lead and never plugged into that “good-for-nothing piece of junk” sitting on the desk in your exam room. The sadness in this story is that the computer and the Internet are (or at least could be) good for some things, including the statewide prescription drug monitoring program that Dr. Konopka can’t participate in. Immunization data banks, prescribing programs that minimize physician error, and systems for storing and plotting your patient’s lab work and metrics are just a few of the things that a good computer system is good for. And, of course, there is the real-time access to the vast store of medical and research knowledge that has made textbooks obsolete.
But somewhere along the way the computer has been hijacked by those who see it primarily as a billing instrument and a tool for risk management. This unfortunate detour has forced physicians into the mind-numbing and time-consuming role of data entry clerks. Fueled by the myth that clicking a box on a computer screen guarantees that a history was taken or that a body part was actually examined has resulted in the generation of crisply formatted reports of dubious value.
I’m not sure where we can go from here without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and starting from scratch. We have computer scientists and physicians who I am sure could create a patient- and physician-friendly system that could cover the whole country. The trick will be keeping the politicians out of the room.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at pdnews@frontlinemedcom.com .
