The Human-Machine Interface: Inviting Your Computer Into Your Patient-Clinician Relationship

In this issue featuring new technology in medicine, there should be one article reminding us of the importance of “high touch” to balance “high tech.” Marshall McLuhan offered a metaphor to describe the pace of change that disturbs our equilibrium. “The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie.” We must attend to the way new technologies touch us and make us feel, and to how the use of technology in a patient setting demands a complementary personal touch from clinicians. This is required to make certain the patient’s experience isn’t too clinical, rational, distant, hard-edged, cold, or impersonal. Though you will read about many new technologies in this issue— video CME, genetic therapies, investigational procedures, electronic records, sensor technology—I will focus on the most ubiquitous phenomenon: the human interface with technology, most specifically the human interaction with the computer. You and it. And how you relate. McLuhan’s dictum, “The medium is the message,” raises the question: With the computer becoming the predominant medium in our clinician-patient interactions, what is the message? Is the computer yet another machine driving a wedge between patient and clinician, or, because the computer can be so animate, is this a machine that can help build communication and relationship?