Which of the following events is most traumatic for a practicing physician?

• Your staff doesn’t show up because the roads are flooded, but the waiting room is full of patients.
• Medicare notifies you that coding discrepancies will result in an audit of 2 years of Medicare records.
• You receive an offer of employment by a corporate medical institution who will bury your practice if you do not sign.
• Your key expert witness defending you in your upcoming medical malpractice case is incarcerated.
• Your office electronic medical records (EMR) system suffers a cardiac arrest.

Tough choices, I know. Our office lost complete access to EMR for 3 days, and it wasn’t pretty. I don’t grasp the technical (doubletalk) explanation for the temporary EMR coma, but we were reminded of how dependent we are on technology. Our IT gurus were working tirelessly, but their adversary was wily and formidable. Finally, they prevailed, but I wouldn’t regard this as a clean win for us. We were hobbling for 3 days. The fried server has been rebuilt and now has reinforcements to insulate against another crippling assault.

Ink and paper never crash.

Luckily, our brains were still functioning adequately during these 72 hours. We hadn’t yet lost the ability to obtain a medical history without pointing & clicking. Somehow, we managed to obtain a review of systems without trolling and scrolling across our laptop monitors. Ancient physician techniques, such as maintaining eye contact and offering nods of understanding to patients, were effortlessly recalled, like riding a bicycle. I even prepared a few paper prescriptions, once I was able to locate a yellowed and tattered prescription pad. I hope the pharmacies will accept these medical anachronisms.

The tough reality is that during these 3 days we had no records available for the patients we saw. We compensated when we could, with faxes and phone reports, but this is no substitute for a complete medical record. Patients arrived to review test results that we couldn’t access. In some cases, I had faxed biopsy reports available, but not the accompanying endoscopy operative reports that were hiding in the EMR black hole. Patients were understanding of our dilemma, since many had faced their own computer rages. But, many of them did not receive a full measure of medical services from us. I asked some to return to see me for another visit, once the EMR was resuscitated, as I feared I may have overlooked some important issue during the 3 days of Stone Age medicine.

Technology is the opium of the people. We love technology. We demand it. We upgrade it. And, we are hooked on it. Like any addiction, when the fix isn’t there for us, withdrawal is painful.

Michael Kirsch is a gastroenterologist who blogs at MD Whistleblower.

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