Today was a tough day in terms of my optimism for the future. Not in a hopeless way, but in a “Oy vey, there’s a lot to do” sort of way. However, there are massive barriers towards doing the “a lot”. As a rising M2, this is my last free summer, so all of my future work will be done during “free time” outside of school/work, which I’m led to believe doesn’t really exist. This doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything, it just means that I’ll have to be methodical about picking and choosing projects.
One of my main interests (at least now) is EMR. Today’s talk was amazing, but mind-bogglingly upsetting. I knew there are plenty of issues with U.S. EMRs, but I didn’t understand the extent of the awfulness (and I probably still don’t). For the past few months, I’ve been thinking specifically about interoperability of EMRs, which was brought up today. It seems to me that “safety” can’t even be a goal until interoperability is achieved. If clinicians don’t have the full story, mistakes (or misguided decisions) are as unavoidable as a car accident for a vision-impaired driver.