Numerous reports have shown that the medical profession is responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths a year, according to medical informatics pioneer Dr. Lawrence L. Weed.
"Where's the outrage? You get one plane crashing and it's on the evening news for days. Well, there's no outrage. No one's investigating it," Weed said during a rare appearance at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) last week in New Orleans.
Weed, 89, has been advocating -- often to deaf ears -- for the computerization of healthcare because he strongly believes the human mind simply is not capable of remembering every nuance of medicine and disease without assistance from what we now know as clinical decision support systems.