In the fall of 1980, my parents made me take a high school class that I was REALLY angry over. It was a waste of time. It was beneath my dignity. It was something I never was going to use. It was embarrassing.
Dr. Allan M. Block
It was ... typing.
And I was completely wrong.
Looking back from 2021, I have to say that, of all the things I learned in high school, it’s probably the skill I depend on the most every day. It’s probably been at least 25 years since I had a day when I didn’t type something.
Some of it is the rise of the Internet and computers, but a lot of it is also the way I run my practice. My schedule isn’t as busy as those of my colleagues in general practice, and I don’t use one of those new-fangled EMRs (my charts are on computer, but not in a specialized program per se).
I’ve always been my own transcriptionist. I type roughly 40 words a minute; certainly not blazing speed, but enough to get the job done. For a few years I used voice dictation, but the only speech program I really liked folded up years ago (yes, ViaVoice, I still miss you).
So now I just type, and proofread, all my own notes. Old-school maybe, certainly not efficient as far as time goes, but it works for me. My thoughts go through my fingers directly into the chart, occasionally pausing to think something through before I put it in or hitting backspace if I think of a better way to phrase it.
Writing the notes myself allows me to tell the patient’s story, and think about it in the process. It allows me to work through it again the next time I open the chart, months, or even years, later. Hopefully it shows my thought process and why I did things the way I did for myself, the colleague I’m sending the note to, and any physicians down the line.
I could probably save time with a system that lets me just check boxes or circle pertinent positives and negatives in a template, but that’s not how my thought process works. I feel like I’d be missing something if I did.
And, 41 years later, it’s still a reminder of how much of my parents’ advice was correct. Because at the time, I was pretty sure they were wrong.
Dr. Block has a solo neurology practice in Scottsdale, Ariz.