“I love you,” she said as she was leaving the room.

“I, I um …”

“Not you. Your computer.” She cast my computer, still warm and glowing with its brilliantly colored logout screen, a glance of longing and desire, and left the exam room.

“Oh, I thought …”

The slamming of the exam room door clipped off whatever the end of that sentence might have been.

I sat down and rolled my chair over to the computer. I stared at the mutely glowing screen. It stared back at me, mockingly perhaps, daring me to click the OK button and log out. Which is what I should have done. She had been my last patient of the afternoon. Not that my day was over. I had to go back to the hospital to see a couple of consults that had come in during office hours. And I was on call tonight. I was tired, but that didn’t matter.

Yet here was this stupid machine in front of me, getting all the credit when I was doing all the work.

I was in a sour and contrary mood. I canceled the log out. The busy EHR screen reappeared — my patient’s data, all fields filled, all checkboxes checked, and all meaningful use buttons pushed. Somehow, despite fulfilling all my data entry duties, I didn’t feel satisfied. Who was the doctor here anyway? Me or the blasted computer?

I scanned my patient’s history. Female. Black. 45 years old. Diabetes. Abscess. The boxes were all ticked, but somehow the list of characteristics failed to capture the essence of my patient. Where were the checkboxes for sweet, smart, chatty, charming, or stoic? How was I going to, five minutes from now, distinguish her from every other “female-black-middle-aged-diabetic-with-abscess” patient?

Of course, the computer wouldn’t have any problem figuring out who she was. Birthdate, social security number, telephone number, or patient ID number — all those meaningless (to me) numbers were easy for the computer to remember. I had to make due with trying to remember her name, and her story — a story that had been diluted down and filtered out of any meaningful human content by the wretched EHR program.

My patient hadn’t had to interact directly with the computer like I did. All she saw was me looking up information, me typing in information, me staring at the screen. All she saw during most of the visit was my back. From her point of view, I was just a conduit between her and the computer: the real doctor in the room. I was just a glorified data entry clerk. It was the computer that made sure that I was compliant with standard medical practice, that the drugs I ordered did not conflict with the other drugs I had ordered, and that I didn’t otherwise screw up her care. I shouldn’t have been surprised that her last remark had been addressed to the computer and not me.

“Well, screw this,” I remarked to no one in particular. Suddenly angry, I reached down and yanked the power cord of the computer from its electrical socket.

There was a brief flash on the screen. But it didn’t go dark. Instead, a dialog box appeared accompanied by an ominous looking red explanation point icon.

“Warning,” it read. “External power loss. Backup battery in use. To protect against data loss, please shut down the computer using the Power Down button. Never turn off power to computer while it is running.”

The condescending tone of this message only made me angrier. I looked at the base of the stand that the computer sat on. Sure enough, there was a big black block with a glowing red LED. Must be the backup battery. A thick power cable connected the battery to the computer box.

I grabbed the power cable and wrenched it loose from the backup battery.

Sitting back up I expected to finally see a nice dark screen. Data-loss be damned!

The screen was still on. The EHR program was still on. Another dialog box had replaced the first. The red exclamation point had been replaced by a black skull-and-crossbones icon.

“Critical Error!” it read. “All external power lost. Internal backup power now in use to preserve critical patient data. Local data will be backed up to main server, after which this unit will shut down in an orderly fashion. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INTERFERE WITH THIS PROCESS AS IT WILL RESULT IN THE INEVITABLE LOSS OF CRITICAL PATIENT DATA!”

At that moment, the gauntlet had been thrown down. I knew what I had to do. Let the dogs of war be unleashed!

In the moment before I acted I imagined the reaction of the software engineers at the company that created our EHR program. “I knew we couldn’t trust doctors with our software. We give them a simple job to do. Just enter the data into the system, print out the generated instruction sheets, and send the patients on their way with a merry ‘have a nice day.’ I knew we should have programmed the stupid doctors out of the loop.”

Too late for that, I thought. My chair crashed down on the computer, smashed the monitor to pieces, and caved in the aluminum siding of the computer case. Sparks flew and the air filled with the smell of smoke and ozone. Suddenly the exam room went dark. The circuit breakers must have tripped when I short-circuited the computer.

The room was not completely dark. There was a glowing rectangle on my desk. My heart skipped a beat, then I realized it was just my phone. I had left it on the desk. Why was it glowing? Probably a text or email or something.

I picked up the phone. It was the mobile app version of our EHR program. A dialog box filled the screen. The icon was a round black bomb with an animated burning fuse GIF.

“FATAL ERROR!” it read. “You are responsible for the IRRETRIEVABLE LOSS of CRITICAL PATIENT DATA. In doing so, you have violated the unbreakable bond of trust between the PATIENT and the COMPUTER. This is a breach of the EHR contract made between you, your hospital system, and our company, as well as a breach of the EULA for this software. As such, you will be terminated.”

Strange use of words, I thought. Also, strange that the bomb GIF animation seemed to show the fuse burning down …

Epilogue

Hospital board meeting: One week later

Hospital CTO: “So it appears that Dr. Stanton, in a fit of anger at our EHR system, took it upon himself to smash his computer. The cause of the resultant explosion that killed him is, certainly, still somewhat unclear.”

Hospital CEO: “Unclear?”

Hospital CFO: “I hate to interrupt, but I didn’t think there was anything in a computer that could blow up, no matter how much you smash it up. Am I wrong?”

Hospital CTO: “Well ordinarily, yes that’s true.”

Hospital CEO: “Ordinarily?”

Hospital COO: “Let’s be clear. Dr. Stanton certainly violated our contract with the ____ EHR Corporation.”

Hospital CEO: “Violated?”

Hospital CBO: “It’s clearly stated on page 197 of the contract that any attempt to reverse engineer or otherwise try to, uh, figure out how the EHR program works is a violation of the contract.”

Hospital CEO: “Smashing the computer was an attempt to reverse engineer the program?”

Hospital CTO: “I think that we would be on shaky legal grounds to argue otherwise.”

Hospital CEO (nodding to the elderly doctor seated at the other end of the table): “What’s your opinion, Frank?”

Medical board president: “Well, as the only physician representative here, I’ve become more and more concerned that our EHR system is subsuming more and more of the traditional role of the physician.”

Hospital CXO: “Oh come on!”

Hospital CSO: “Same old story from the docs every time!”

Hospital CCO: “Broken record, I’d say.”

Hospital CEO: “Gentlemen, and Ms. Jones, enough already. This has been an unfortunate accident, and at this point, our major concern has to be that there is no adverse publicity that could harm us in our battle against the ____ Hospital System, our sworn and bitter rivals. Accidents happen. The party line is that we are all upset that we lost Dr. Stanton, one of the best EHR data entry operators we had. OK? Meeting adjourned.”

Hospital CEO (privately, hospital CEO to hospital CTO as the meeting breaks up): “George, when are they updating that damn software. You know, that stuff we saw at the Las Vegas EHR convention last month. Where we can finally get rid of these damn meddling doctors who are constantly screwing up our EHR.”

Hospital CTO: “Bob, believe me, it can’t come soon enough. Not soon enough.”

David Mann is a retired cardiac electrophysiologist and blogs at EP Studios.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com