Distracted Doctoring: How Digital Devices Can Lead to Medical Mistakes
When doctors focus on the computer, rather than the patient, the risk of medical malpractice multiplies.

January 28, 2012 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Delivering effective medical care requires the care and precision that can only come when doctors and staff are paying full attention. This cannot happen if they are distracted by smartphones, iPads, or other electronic devices.

To be sure, devices designed to allow easy access to important information about patient care can play a useful role in medical treatment. But when doctors focus on the computer, rather than the patient, the risk of medical malpractice multiplies.

Doctors Tempted by Gadgets

Though the transition is not yet complete, electronic medical records are replacing the old paper charts that doctors and nurses formerly used to maintain patient information. In the digital age, that transition is certainly understandable. Yet it comes with a major downside: doctors and other healthcare workers who are so glued to their computer screens that they fail to pay sufficient attention to the patient in front of them.

Dr. Peter J. Papadakos, the director of critical care at the University of Rochester Medical Center, recently published an article in a medical journal about electronic distraction among medical workers. He believes that patients' lives are in danger from distracted doctoring.

"You justify carrying devices around the hospital to do medical records," Dr. Papadakos said. "But you can surf the Internet or do Facebook, and sometimes, for whatever reason, Facebook is more tempting."

Documentation of the distraction problem has begun. In one peer-reviewed survey of 439 medical technicians, over half (55 percent) admitted they had talked on cellphones even while monitoring bypass machines during surgery. Half of the technicians admitted they had texted during surgery.

Such lapses in attention do not always lead to medical errors. But they have the potential to be disastrous.

Cognitive Overload

Distracted doctoring essentially involves the same type of phenomenon as with distracted drivers of motor vehicles. The evidence keeps coming in about how cognitive overload from trying to use a cellphone while driving keeps the brain from focusing on the task of driving -- causing many accidents that could have been prevented.

That is why the National Transportation Safety Board recommended last month that states ban almost all cellphone behind the wheel, even if the driver has a hands-free device. The point is that even with a hands--free device, the mind is still distracted by competing claims on its attention. The same type of ban on the use of digital devices should apply in hospitals when doctors and other staff are doing patient care.

What Can Be Done

No one is advocating that medicine retreat into a mythical past in which doctors carried only a simple black bag. Earlier in the modern era, beepers and telephones became valid, even indispensable tools. What's different now is the interactivity of the devices and the desire to make medicine as data-driven as possible.

Before delving into the deluge of data, however, doctors should take the time to listen to each patient. All of the warp-driven data in the world will be of limited use if doctors miss the important clues given by the person right in front of them. Worse than that, it could easily lead to misdiagnosis, failure to diagnose, or some other medical error.

In other words, the problem goes far behind lab techs using Facebook during an operation. It involves the need to fully recognize the patient as a human being, not merely a digital data point.

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