Looking beyond technology to shape the emergency department of the future
Technology will help shape the future of emergency medicine, but not as much as understanding the social forces that influence patients' health and disease.
Not long ago, I attended a lecture given by a highly regarded emergency physician. His talk, “The Future of Emergency Medicine,” focused on how advances in will transform emergency care. The following week, as I walked down a corridor at the back of my hospital, I passed seven telemedicine robots, each with a hastily scrawled “Out of Order” note taped to its screen. That captured my uneasy feelings about how interacting with a patient via internet video link
