Thought provoking interview! I appreciate your balanced approach to the analysis of problems in the American health care system.

Bravo for Dr. Lobosky I look forward to meeting him Tuesday evening. But I must express dismay at the assertion by Dr. Lobosky (and many others) that electronic medical records represent an advance or improvement in care. It sounds good in theory, but in practice just creates yet another firewall between the doctor and the patient. ALL such forms that I have reviewed attempt to shoehorn patients into statistically per-selected categories that represent the commonest diagnoses but exclude less common diseases. For example, interstitial cystitis, a devastating and debilitating disease afflicting 450,000 Americans, mostly women, is not -and cannot - be indicated on any electronic medical history form I have seen. Indeed, because these forms are typically formatted “constitutionally”, most multi-system illnesses cannot be indicated. The form I completed most recently excluded mention of ANY immunological or hematological disease. Biomedical researchers have long lamented the sad fact that it takes “about a generation” for advances to make it from the research laboratory to clinical practice. Increased reliance on the procrustian process imposed by electronic medical records can only exacerbate this problem.