I visited a doctor’s office and was surprised when his secretary pulled out a card – a ruled cardboard rectangle – to fill in my data. She had boxes of such patient cards in her office. A natural first reaction would be that this doctor must be pretty old and behind the times…

Then I saw the doctor, and he was neither old nor behind – in fact he not only had a computer on his desk, but after a few minutes he whipped out an iPad, which he seemed very happy with and used with speed and effectiveness to demonstrate some points to me. So I asked him, what’s with the old cards?

The reply is worth noting: scribbling on a card allows him to maintain a personal interaction with his patients. To type, you have to turn away from the patient and immerse yourself in the machine’s user interface; a card is unobtrusive and its usage is much faster and less exclusive of the patient; you can use it facing the patient. On top of which , it is not prone to crashes and outages!

This all made good sense – but unfortunately is not going to last: the doc told me he expects that the medical establishment (HMOs, hospitals, insurers, etc) will soon force all physicians to use their mandated computer tools, and that will be that. Come to think of it, if they took the extra step to port their software to the iPad, which is almost as flat as a card, we may have the best of both worlds!