Recently , in a discussion with a software developer from Microsoft (and after sprouting my new-found Python programming baby wings!) , I mentioned my hypothesis: Healthcare has created a new patent class – the digital patient – and often this class of patient supersedes the actual living, breathing patient.
He instantly became defensive, and said, “That problem isn’t in the software”, – as if I had been referring to some type of software bug that needed to be fixed!
Wow.
He is right in one sense. The problem with digitalizing patients isn’t in the software; it is the software.
We, the healthcare community, have to accept that objectifying patients (and I mean this literally, as in creating patient objects with associated attributes {characteristics} and methods {actions} which model patients in the digital space) is inherently, and by definition, dehumanizing.
Only then, when we look at this squarely in the face, can we start to address what this means.