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One of the great myths of modern medicine, often perpetuated by the doctors themselves, is that the physician knows best.
Couple this to the fact that some med schools no longer require the Hippocratic oath of their grads, and this story has the potential to grow more lethal -- a virtual cancer.

I don't see how this could not improve health care. You go in and give all your info to the nurse or PA and they dutifully take it down. Then the doctor comes in and asks you what's ailing you and A. either you try to go over it all again or B. you believe they will refer to your chart. The sad truth is they don't have much time and/or have an air that they know what is wrong and order a test or pull out that old Rx pad faster than a gun slinger ever dreamed of. "Thank you very much and take this to the front desk." Then there is the follow up, where, because most doctors' office are now mega patient factories, you feel like you're starting all over again when you walk in the door. With a system like this in place, it makes sense to me that a lot of the repeat and shotgun approach to diagnosis might be eliminated. And the part where they think it will make patients take unnecessary tests, I think it could be a wash as to the number, but with more hits than misses.

Absolutely fascinating. This is the classic "protocol" taken to a digital masterpiece of a conclusion, and provides much food for thought. The first problem I see in instituting such a process in hospitals and docs' offices is the apparent time-consumption it would demand. Already there is copious documentation to CYA everybody ---hospital, staff, accountant, billing coder, technicians and doctor and consulting doctors-- this documentation may take three or four times as long as the personnel actually spend with the patient...this sounds like a process that could take hours...

Prepared to pay for it?

If this is a diagnstic breakthrough, there'll be some resistence by the diehards who hate change, but what is described here is exaggerated and plays on a tiresome and childish resentment of doctors. Based, IMO, not on the fact that doctors play god, but that they fail to be the god that patients expect and demand.

A surgeon was on C-SPAN this weekend talking about similar issues. He said that the doctors go to all these long years of schools, then are expected to have all that information in their head, instantly available. He said that's ridiculous. He also pointed out that the use of computers simply for creating the prescription (avoiding dosage errors and handwriting recognition problems) would avoid many deaths each year. So I guess I would like my doctor to have a computer handy (a handheld one if it didn't pass germs, etc. from patient to patient).