The Plight of the Modern Medical Student: Navigating Ancient Hospital Technologies

3rd year Medical Student clinical orientation:

"Here is your pager and instructional YouTube video on how to use a fax machine.  If you need a refresher on how to find a patient's ECG on a blast email without the patient's name being on any of the ECGs or emails, please talk to IT.

Anyway, it is critical you learn how to use these because if someone is having a heart attack, this is how we coordinate care.  

Oh, and by the way if you are looking for the patient's previous medical records from another facility, it is much faster to just start over and repeat everything. 

If anything stops working, just turn if off and back on again.  Welcome to medicine. Good luck!"

According to a recent CNBC article, each year new doctors are taught to use outdated technologies like pagers and fax machines during their medical training -- and these devices are so old that the only place most of these clinicians have EVER seen them is in the hospital. 

Fax machines are not secure (anyone can see faxes that contain sensitive patient information if not picked up right away) and are notorious for sending information in piecemeal fashion, causing confusion and delays in care. 

Our patients deserve better. They deserve for us to be transmitting their information in a fully secure way, where it goes directly to the intended party, instantly -- with nothing left behind to fall into the wrong hands. They deserve quicker treatment from clinicians who get the information they need instantly, rather than delaying care because they're waiting on a fax that could take hours to arrive. Our patients deserve to have care providers who use real-time team communication across healthcare entities.