According to CMS, if you are a hospital or provider that accepts Medicare, your reimbursement will be “adjusted” if you haven’t converted to electronic medical records by 2015. So this is coming, whether you like it or not. I’ve heard people say they were going to move or change jobs, but unless you leave the medical field, it will catch up with you.

We need to be careful with this for the future. Our new interns and residents are being trained this way, in this frame of mind. Time at the patient’s bedside is the most valuable part of the experience. It’s what the patients will remember about their visit.

I suppose we will just have to adjust. We’ve done it before – it’s not like we’ve not been using computers in health care. However, I feel like this total electronic adoption business will force us to decrease time with our patients and things will get missed.

Medicine isn’t just a science, a set of algorithms that any idiot can follow. It’s an art as well, for it is the partnership between the healer and sufferer that makes our profession great and special. We need to hold on to this, or computers will shut us down and hurtle us into space.

Dr. Bundy is an attending physician at ERMed, LLC, in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist who not only sings in the car but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.