For at least a decade, hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping improve medical care, have been equipping their offices, operating rooms and staff with nifty computers, ipads, smartphones and other electronic devices. This is great for quickly digging up patient data and drug information. But it also has a dark side.
Doctors and nurses and technicians, just like the rest of us, can get addicted to the “fun” side of these new technologies – social media, texting, tweeting, etc. So addicted, in fact, that they text, tweet, talk and web-surf during important medical procedures.
Apparently, America’s gadget addiction has even penetrated the operating room. For example, more than half of technicians who monitor bypass machines admit they had texted during surgery. Other examples abound. A nurse in an Oregon hospital was caught checking airfares on a computer in the operating room.