Why 99 Percent of the Irrationally Exuberant About Health IT Need To Be Removed From Healthcare

At Roy Poses' cross post "Why 99 percent of health care should be angry" over at the KevinMD blog, I introduced a comment into the "eruption of controversy" (his term here) caused by his post.

My comment was on the topic of government and health IT:

scotsilv 3 days ago

As one of Roy Poses' co-bloggers and a Medical Informaticist, I can say with certainty that government involvement in healthcare has been disastrous. Specifically, via ONC, ARRA and the HITECH Act, prematurely pushing still-experimental healthcare information technology on an unsuspecting medical profession (for the most part) and public. See "An updated reading list on health IT" at http://tinyurl.com/emrreadingl..., .

A reply typical of the irrationally exuberant was added to the thread (emphases mine):

Brett Mello 1 day ago in reply to scotsilv

What are you basing your "certainty" on? The examples discussed in the links sound like a case of bad configuration of an EMR. It could also be a just a poor solution from a vendor. Do you know if these were even a certified applications? I would like to suggest not painting all EMR implementations and the overall value of EMR’s from a single, albeit tragic, example. [I.e., an "anecdote" - ed.] A well implemented EMR, configured in collaboration with an organization’s physicians, has been repeatedly proven to reduce medical and medication errors. Why would any educated person, including legislators and executives, support the use of a tool that would increase harm, not safety.

Education aside, we will all be patients at some point so our innate need for self preservation would seem contrarian to arbitrary investments in useless technology to manage our care. Our current health delivery method produces far more harm than the new technology being implemented to address it. We need to embrace technology and make it work for us rather than putting our heads in the sand. Take the following quote as an example:

"That it will ever come into general use, notwithstanding its value, is extremely doubtful because its beneficial application requires much time and gives a good bit of trouble, both to the patient and to the practitioner because its hue and character are foreign and opposed to all our habits and associations." - The London Times, 1834 commenting on the "stethoscope"

Note that this reply came after I presented a link to a long list of articles, more than 50, with links to each article or its abstract for ease of reference, and a personal account of healthcare IT failure.

The articles challenge the beliefs in technological determinism common about health IT, i.e., that computers + medicine 'automagically' lead to better medicine, because, well, of the addition of computers, which must improve medicine, just - because.

The reason I write that the reply was typical of the irrationally exuberant is due to the interrelationship between irrationality, logical fallacy, and absence of evidence. These characteristics are usually present in the writings proffered by those so afflicted - and, to those with vested interests in health IT, a.k.a. conflicts of interest, I should add.

I replied:

medinf 16 hours ago in reply to Brett Mello

You are lacking references supporting your arguments, which in themselves display logical fallacy.

I urge all readers to see my linked references list at the top of this thread, examine some of them (such as Jon Patrick's work on gross EHR defects, the ECRI Institute's Top Ten List of Healthcare Hazards, Romano et al.'s "Electronic Health Records and Clinical Decision Support Systems: Impact on National Ambulatory Care Quality" and others).

There are articles from reputable sources indicating today's health IT, lacking cognitive support and other necessities for clinicians (such as per the National Research Council itself in an investigation led by health IT pioneers Octo Barnett and William Stead, see http://www8.nationalacademies.... ) does not improve quality of care, and can cause harm.

These articles should raise caution in any physician, nurse or hospital contemplating use of this technology. These reports should not be cavalierly ignored, but should be a flag for great caution. The point is, with the literature conflicting, the technology should be considered experimental and caution used when deployed on human subjects. That includes both patients and clinicians, the former who can be injured or killed, the latter whose careers can be ruined through computer-caused or computer-aggravated errors. [Note: in health IT experiments, clinicians are, in fact, also experimental subjects - ed.]

Re: "The examples discussed in the links sound like a case of bad configuration of an EMR" - you omit the existence of clinical IT defects and problems such as poor software engineering causing unreliability, mission hostile human-computer interfaces (e.g., see http://www.tinyurl.com/hostile... ), incorrect or incomplete decision support algorithms, terminological problems, and other issues. You seem to indicate the findings in the reading list may be "anecdotal." A crushing reply to that line of thought, from an expert in Australia, is here: http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/... .

As far as "certification" of HIT, this has little if anything to do with safety, reliability, usability, etc. ( e.g,, see http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/... ). "Certification" of health IT is not validation of safety, usability, efficacy, etc., but a pre-flight checklist of features, interoperability, security and the like. The certifiers admit this explicitly. See the CCHIT web pages for example.

You use the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority" - or show severe naivete - in asking "why would any educated person, including legislators and executives, support the use of a tool that would increase harm, not safety."

"We need to embrace technology and make it work for us rather than putting our heads in the sand" - I ask - why now, if the technology is not ready? This seems like an appeal to novelty and perhaps the bandwagon fallacy (see http://www.nizkor.org/features... ).

Regarding your 1834 London Times quote, that was in a time before the human subjects experimentation guidelines such as the Belmont Report, World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki, Guidelines for Conduct of Research Involving Human Subjects at NIH, the Nuremberg Code, and others came into being.

That said, the use of the 1834 stethoscope analogy is a type of red herring fallacy (http://www.nizkor.org/features... ). A stethoscope and enterprise clinical IT have little in common, the latter being potentially harmful to the point of causing patient death through interference in clinical care. (I note that if the 1834 story was brought up as an allusion to doctors and nurses who dislike today's IT being "Luddites" or the like, then that's an ad hominem fallacy.)

We as a society have supposedly learned something since 1834 regarding experimental medical devices. Or have we? FDA's Jeffrey Shuren MD, JD, Director of CDRH has admitted explicitly that health IT are medical devices with definite, but unknown, levels of risk - FDA stats "may represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the HIT-related problems that exist" were the exact words. That is prima facie evidence the devices are experimental.

However FDA refrains from regulating them under the FD&C Act, as they do pharma IT, other medical devices, drugs, etc. because they are a political "hot potato" - as at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/... , http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/..., and http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/... ).

As is customary at Healthcare Renewal, at those three posts are links to source, quoted in full context.

I've replied to so many irrationally exuberant commenters on this very blog, that I could have authored the reply above in my sleep.

Two points:

1. My reply and its links (and the source those links lead to) can and should be used as a "template" by clinicians to educate themselves, to reply to the health IT irrationally exuberant in their organizations, and to those in government prematurely pushing this technology onto clinicians;

2. The health IT irrationally exuberant, being irrational, ill-informed, and often markedly resistant to education, need to be removed from healthcare entirely. Their cavalier attitudes about cybernetic medical experiments are dangerous, and have no place in medical affairs. Such people impede, rather then help remediate the quality, safety, usability, and efficacy of health IT. In doing so, they contribute to increased risk and to actual patient harm. The irrationally exuberant are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

-- SS