It would be really weird to walk into a bank and have the teller take down your information on pen and paper. But it happens all the time in medicine! We accept the fact that doctors scrawl our information onto pieces of paper because of an incredible struggle to get medicine to go digital. On this episode of The Weeds, we look at what the big obstacles are — and how health care would change if paper medical records became a thing of the past.
The Weeds: a medical struggle to digitize, a tax calculator, and a paper that explains Trump
Also in this episode: A new tax calculator reveals how the candidates want to change your taxes, and a political science paper from 2014 helps predict the rise of Trumpism.
You can download the episode here or listen below — and always feel free to email us at weeds@vox.com!
Show notes:
- Those charts I brought to our taping and talked about a lot
- The 2012 Health Affairs article that found electronic medical records don’t save money
- Atul Gawande’s New Yorker piece on the epidemic of unnecessary care
- The American Academy of Pediatricians’ advice on giving medications to children with fevers — and the This American Life piece on the risk of overdose
- Alvin Chang’s tax calculator
- Dylan Matthews’s piece on how Bernie Sanders underestimates the cost of his single-payer system
- Ezra argues that we’ve lost track of how irresponsible the Republican tax plans are
- Matt’s summary of our research paper of the week
