"EMR can do a lot more than paper"

It can but in many cases if an office cannot organize their paper they will fail at electronic organization. I have written several programs and designed systems to take offices from paper to computers. If the office was previously organized with paper the transition to computer records was smooth, if not it was a crap shoot.

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"Once people learn to type - not that difficult of a task - most type faster than they write, and more clearly as well."

Here again you are shifting workload to the doctor. Unless there is an assistant in the exam room to handle the technology this sort of thing will always result in fewer patients being seen. You will have a hard time beating the current system of dictation and trained transcriptionists for putting fairly large amounts of nuanced encounter information into a EMR system.

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"As to privacy - it's not that hard - passwords - potentially even held by the patient themselves. You leave the terminal, you lock it. That's what my doctor's office does."

Any reasonably competent computer technician can take control of a machine when they have physical access within minutes. After that the door is WIDE open.

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"Someone can hack it - but then, someone can bribe a janitor and have a look at any number of medical records easily enough anyway. It's easier to secure electronic records."

It all depends on what you mean by secure. You can carry ALL the electronic records out of a good size medical practice in your pocket. All the janitor has to do is lift the last backup tape. Encryption can help but it difficult to implement with real security in a clinic wide setting.

"Many EMRs even tout the fact that you can just check-mark boxes and have the EMR produce a progress note. Actually, no, it doesn't produce a progress note, it produces a standardized document with canned phrases, legal and billing boilerplate, a hundred irrelevant lab tests and radiology reports automatically cut-and-pasted from the system, and useless verbiage from prior notes you wrote to comprise a 10 page "progress note" that will get you a level 4 E&M billing code and will keep the lawyers happy in the event of a lawsuit."

EXACTLY!

A letter several pages back that equated the choices a McDonalds employee has on their cash register with how a doctor would work an EMR system was truly frightening.

Garbage In Garbage Out.

Fix the real problem, the blood sucking tick that has attached itself to our health care system.

We did the same thing over 15 years ago with alpha numeric pagers around the newsroom. Who cares?

When the President was asked what sacrifice the American people could make he should have added "Subscribe to the local paper" to his follow the debate in Washington comment.

I bet he could have saved hundreds of jobs by simply stating the obvious, people who read newspapers know more than those that don't.

Repeat this; eBay is my friend...

Their are few phones that have time to be broken that cannot be had on the bay. Instead of paying $35 per month just get a whole new-to-you road-tested phone on eBay.

A quick search of "swivel phone" in "Cell Phones & Smartphones" on eBay yielded 41 results. The most likely to be mistakenly opened as a flip look to be variants of the Nokia 737x.

A refined search on "nokia 737* returned 166 results. Of these quite a few are available from well rated US sellers for around $130 BIN for a NEW phone to around $70 used at auction.

A phone is a phone. Don't be ripped off by the cell store.

"Are iPhone (and Blackberry owners) more confident that they will never drop or lose these items than the rest of us mistake-prone humans?"

The last Treo 650 I bought for a customer was like brand new and cost $120 delivered. My daughter's iPhone was $180 delivered. It looks a little crummy but works fine.

Also check craigslist.org. I bought a perfect condition 650 with ALL the accessories for $50.

If you are using a Palm and a phone the Treo 650 is the best of the Treos for you. MOst of the later Treos offered NO improvement and a decrease in durability and range. If you wait the Pre' should be better but it will be at least a year or so before the price is reasonable.

Nothing is worth more than it sells for on eBay; some things are worth less...

It is unfortunate that this sort of story is a model of necessary form of current journalism. While this story made the op-ed page of a newspaper most memes of this sort don't.

At least a third of our country is all worked up about something they hear on the Right Wing Noise Machine (RWNM) everyday. They don't see any reference to these stories in the Main Stream Media and assume there is some sort of cover-up going on. This feedback loop is one reason Fox and the Fat Man are so successful.

Currently the RWNM has their listeners worked up about:

The fairness doctrine

Global currency

HR 875 and it's effect on home gardens

Gun control

China supplanting the US as the world superpower

And many other things you have to hear to believe.

While Salon has done a decent job on keeping an eye on these "tempest in a teapot" stories most other media have not. My suggestion to any newspaper struggling with readership to devote a decent editor to keep an ear on the RWNM and write factual stories about the issues they hear. These stories should NOT reference the RWNM origin. The stories will serve to break the cover-up connection and enable their readers to be prepared to discuss the issues with the 30% that is steamed up about the latest "outrage".