The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age

The New York Times Science Bestseller from Robert Wachter, Modern Healthcare¿s #1 Most Influential Physician-Executive in the US

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare¿s ills.

But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization ¿ until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital.

Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply wrong. Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with their patients? How could one of America¿s leading hospitals give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic, despite a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system? How could a recruiting ad for physicians tout the absen