Interview, Satire - A Tongue-in-Cheek Interview with an Information Technology Expert

This lighthearted parody is a play on words and is not intended to downplay the significance of the Health 2.0 movement which is upon us and is growing stronger each day.


Q: Doctor Algorithm, you’re an acknowledged information technology expert. We’re privileged to have you here. I understand you speak the information technology language fluently. In other words, you’ve mastered the IT lingo. Is that correct?

A: That’s basically correct, I must say, in all immodesty and with an enormous lack of humility

Hopefully my expertise has a meaningful relevance to the exacerbating and escalating misunderstandings and incompatibilities encountered by physician end-users who find our flawless and facilitating flow of uninterrupted throughput and prodigious output to be dysfunctional and disruptive in their inefficient and unsafe practices, which need all our online and in-office digital assistance they can comprehend , which isn’t much.. Surely they can set aside time away from their revenue-producing practices to go linearly, longitudinally, and lickety-split and clickety-click through our vast menus.

Q: What’s your complaint about doctors?

A: Simply the fact that practicing doctors are consistently shunning, snubbing, and sniveling at our clarifying, crystallizing, and clairvoyant products. That boggles my mind, and it isn’t rational. We’re the epitome of reductionism and rationality.

Physicians’ computers, you see, ought to be packed, even overloaded, with quadrangulating data from patient health records, electronic medical records, health management sources, and vendor sources - all immediately accessible in inter-interpretative, inter-operative, inter-standardized, inter-changeable, and inter-understandable formats - designed for every other operative and participant in every medical office and in every other health care settings, both in-house and out-house, just like there ought to be a sink in every kitchen, indoor plumbing in every house, a car in every garage, and a computer in every car, bathroom, bedroom, home office, and every personal portable assistant device.

Q: I must say. That’s flawless use of information verbiage. Beautifully articulated, and spoken without a trace of an accent, I might add. I especially like those homey clichés at the end. I appreciate your descending to my level.

Tell me, why don’t doctors like me understand your language? After all, in your mind, every conceptual byte in your cyber universe is perfectly clear, isn’t it?

A: Of course, it is. It’s hard data. In technological cyber heaven , our motto is: “In God we trust. All others use data.” To that great, inviolable, and unquestioned universal truth, I might add, “If it’s digitized, standardized, and descenditized from on high from cyberspace, it’s got to be good.” There’s nothing soft and subjective about it.

Q: Descenditized? That’s another neologism, isn’t it? You’re full of them. I like your use of the word “interoperability” – that’s an 8 syllable, 16 letter jargon jawbreaker. By the way, the term inoperative can also mean beyond surgical intervention, not practical, and not functioning properly. That doesn’t apply to your whole IT scheme, does it?

A: Of course not. Interoperability simply means the entire world is interconnected. Every twain shall meet, every human end shall abut against every other human abutment, and every hand and every mind shall meet, touch, and intertwine.

Q: I assume interoperability systems will include all health care consumers, which includes everyone. After all, we’re all destined to become patients at one time or another.

A: God Bless You. In your divine wisdom, you have grasped the intellectual nettle –ubiquitous transparent information for all -- anywhere, anytime, every time, everywhere, wirelessly, wonderfully, without wavering, waffling, or waiting.

Aggregate! Consolidate! Interdigitate! Those are our rallying cries! Leave no dot unconnected! Connect all the dots! That’s our goal. We don’t call our universe the dot.com world for nothing, you know.

Q: You’re certainly big on exclamation points. But to tell you the truth, you sound a little dotty to me! Perhaps I’m too dotful.

A: Right again! You catch on quickly, don’t you? If you want to be all inclusive, as opposed to all inconclusive, you instinctively know the terms dot.com, dot.org and dot.edu embrace all data dots and all numeric knowledge.

But make no mistake about it. Dot.coms, dot. orgs, and dot.edus will have impenetrable privacy firewalls between them. We, the conquerors and masters of cyber space, will mine data and intervene in care using impeccable data from predictive models and specialty experts, based on 20/20 hindsight and 20/30 foresight, with impunity. Privateers say hackers will tear down our firewalls, but they’re nearsighted, not farsighted like us. We’re not in our dotage.

Q: Doctor Algorithm, forgive me for my abysmal ignorance. But what’s this really all about?

A: I’m glad you asked. It’s about total quality leadership, continuous process improvement, data processing reengineering, protocol redesign and redeployment, clinical data intervention, artificial and virtual medical practice models, interoperable data redistribution, bioinformatics knowledge transfer, analytic algorithmic transparency, reformulating and interconnecting databases, and six sigma organizational transformation. It’s about Health 2.0, Health 3.0, and beyond.

Q; Is that all?

A: That’s enough for now. That ought to hold you. I’ve made myself perfectly transparent, haven’t I