Once Upon an Urgent Care Visit... - Keyboard Dancer

I went to Urgent Care with my fiance last week as he was not feeling well.  They got us right in.  A medical assistant took his vitals immediately. The doctor was in within 5 minutes.  (There was only one person in the waiting room ahead of us and, incidentally, no one yet after us.)  Everyone was very nice, personable, and efficient.  The doctor started asking my fiance questions about his health, as he sat in front of a laptop computer and entered all the information himself.  He would ask a question, my fiance would answer, and he would spend minutes at a time typing in the laptop.  There was also a quick physical examination.  I, as an MT, finally asked him if he had to input all his own info.  He said he did, that the company had spent ‘A Billion Dollars’ for their new system in which they input their own information on the patient visits.  HE said because of it he was not able to spend as much time actually examining patients as was done in the past, instead had to spend this time entering data.  We explained I was a medical transcriptionist, and he remarked that he WISHED he could have a medical transcriptionist, that this was not what he went to medical school for, and he was not a very good typist.  I appreciated his frankness, and when the visit was over we left, sad to see what has become of, at least in this setting, what used to be an honored, appreciated profession, but which is becoming virtually extinct.  The End.