Whopping errors and maddening changes in work flow have even led some physicians to argue that we should exhume our three-ring binders and return to a world of pen and paper.

Image Credit... Mikey Burton

This argument is utterly unpersuasive. Health care, our most information-intensive industry, is plagued by demonstrably spotty quality, millions of errors and backbreaking costs. We will never make fundamental improvements in our system without the thoughtful use of technology. Even today, despite the problems, the evidence shows that care is better and safer with computers than without them.

Moreover, the digitization of health care promises, eventually, to be transformative. Patients who today sit in hospital beds will one day receive telemedicine-enabled care in their homes and workplaces. Big-data techniques will guide the treatment of individual patients, as well as the best ways to organize our systems of care. (Of course, we need to keep such data out of the hands of hackers, a problem that we have clearly not yet licked.) New apps will make it easier for patients to choose the best hospitals and doctors for specific problems — and even help them decide whether they need to see a doctor at all.

Some improvements will come with refinement of the software. Today’s health care technology has that Version 1.0 feel, and it is sure to get better.

But it’s more than the code that needs to improve. In the 1990s, Erik Brynjolfsson, a management professor at M.I.T., described “the productivity paradox” of information technology, the lag between the adoption of technology and the realization of productivity gains. Unleashing the power of computerization depends on two keys, like a safe-deposit box: the technology itself, but also changes in the work force and culture.

In health care, changes in the way we organize our work will most likely be the key to improvement. This means training students and physicians to focus on the patient despite the demands of the computers. It means creating new ways to build teamwork once doctors and nurses are no longer yoked to the nurse’s station by a single paper record. It means federal policies that promote the seamless sharing of data between different systems in different settings.

We also need far better collaboration between academic researchers and software developers to weed out bugs and reimagine how our work can be accomplished in a digital environment.