Opinion: When hospital paperwork crowds out hospital care

A friend was recently hospitalized after a bicycle accident. At one point a nursing student, together with a more senior nurse, rolled a computer on wheels into the room and asked my friend to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10. She mumbled, "4 to 5." The student put 5 into the computer — and then they left, without further inquiring about, or relieving, my friend's pain. This is not an anecdote about nurses not doing their jobs; it's an illustration of what our jobs have become in the age of electronic health records.