The Drawbacks of Data-Driven Medicine

In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift tells of a community of scientists seeking to improve human life through technological innovation. One of their many schemes aims to replace words with implements. Instead of speaking, people will carry backpacks laden with the items about which they need to communicate. This new communication technology will eliminate misunderstandings and also serve as a "universal language, to be understood in all civilized nations."

There is only one drawback to the plan, particularly among the wise. Namely, if a person's business is great and of various kinds, he is obliged "to carry a great bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him." In short, the burden of communication quickly becomes almost too great to bear. As Swift puts it, "I have often beheld two such sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs."

Swift's story sounds absurd, except to many who labor in contemporary health care. I was speaking with a medical student recently who expressed astonishment about by the brevity of physicians' notes in patients' charts at a small, rural hospital. "In our academic medical center, the notes are usually a few pages," she said. "But in the community hospital, they were sometimes only a few sentences."

"In school, we are taught that notes need to be thorough, leaving nothing out. To avoid lawsuits and ensure that you get paid for everything you do, you document absolutely everything. In fact, physicians often copy and paste whole paragraphs of information from one day's note to the next. So I asked one of the physicians, 'How can you get away with such short notes?'"

"He told me their concern was not to avoid lawsuits or get paid, but to take good care of the patients. They try to avoid communicating with each other through the electronic medical record and take every opportunity to talk with each other about the patients they have in common. The charts really only reflect what's needed to summarize those conversations."

These small-town physicians are on to something, a truth about medicine in particular and human communication in general that we, in our rush to take full advantage of the latest information technologies, sometimes forget. Simply put, the amount of information in the patient's chart is not necessarily positively correlated with the quality of the patient's care. Often the presence of more information is symptomatic of decreased levels of communication and understanding.

Read more at The Atlantic. 

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