Good Health IT vs. Bad Health IT

The title of Dr. Scot Silverstein's teaching website at Drexel University, “Contemporary Issues in Medical Informatics: Good Health IT, Bad Health IT, and Common Examples of Healthcare IT Difficulties,” summarizes the veteran physician informaticist's general outlook on the current state of affairs in health information technology. It tells you nothing, however, of the passion with which Silverstein speaks or writes about the subject.

The title of Dr. Scot Silverstein's teaching website at Drexel University, “Contemporary Issues in Medical Informatics: Good Health IT, Bad Health IT, and Common Examples of Healthcare IT Difficulties,” summarizes the veteran physician informaticist's general outlook on the current state of affairs in health information technology. It tells you nothing, however, of the passion with which Silverstein speaks or writes about the subject.

Also a frequent contributor to the popular reformist “Healthcare Renewal” blog, Silverstein writes with the fire you might expect coming from a self-described computer geek who says he has witnessed a faulty electronic health-record system mysteriously drop a single medication from a patient's medication list. That missing drug led to a medical error that resulted in a year of suffering and, eventually, that patient's death, he says. Silverstein's passion is even more understandable when he tells you that patient was the doctor's own mother...

The health IT world, Silverstein says, parts neatly between “good IT” and “bad IT.” There are those who push hard for the good and complain about the bad, physicians and other clinicians he calls “pragmatic,” and for whom he has sympathy and respect. And then there are those who stay silent, ignoring or acquiescing to the bad, the “hyper-enthusiasts” for whom he holds only unmitigated scorn...