This is what it’s like to practice 14 hours of medicine without computers

“It’s going to be ugly today” was my colleague’s assessment at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, when the electronic medical record failed to launch, the Internet could not be accessed, pagers and phones could not connect, and a recording on the helpdesk line noted, “Systems are down, and there is currently no estimated time of resolution.” So we waded into fourteen hours of practicing medicine without computers.

This was not good. Patients’ …

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