New London, New Hampshire.
An elderly local physician has been stripped of her license to practice medicine because she doesn’t use computers.
Health care regulations increasingly demand that doctors must move toward electronic medical records. Such records allow for easy transfer of patient information between doctors and hospitals–and the government.
The move toward digitization of everyone’s medical records threatens to fundamentally undermine the tradition of confidentiality and doctor/patient privilege that has prevailed in western medicine for centuries.
In New Hampshire, government authorities monitor medical records to see if physicians are overprescribing painkillers. A doctor who refuses (or declines) to enter her prescription dosages into the government data system may jeopardize the government’s control over medicine. See here.
