Op-ed: EHRs, AI are making medicine, imaging impersonal--but physicians are to blame

In a May 16 editorial published by The New York Times Magazine, Abraham Verghese, MD, a professor of internal medicine at Stanford University, explained that the popularity of electronic health records (EHRs) and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine may be overriding physicians' clinical judgement more than informing it. Unfortunately, he argues, physicians are becoming more vulnerable to self-doubt in the face of technologic advancement--and physicians are to blame. "In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer; that virtual entity gets all our attention" Verghese wrote. "The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? It's my body, you know!"