The day I sold my green 1998 Buick Century to settle a college loan and instead bought a run-down beat old Geo Metro, which was a stick, by the way, my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces and within each piece there were a million more tiny pieces. I was devastated beyond consolation. It took me forever to learn the mechanics of maneuvering a manual drive. Apart from the stark fallacy of our capitalistic financial system, I learned another important lesson that day – that we have a natural tendency to resist change.

I have discovered one truth about them from all the doctors I have visited in my life, all the doctors I am and have been friends with, also all the doctors that I have as relatives in my family that they are an erudite bunch who possess a paranormal aura of knowledge, wisdom, tradition, and an anthropological air about them. They are healers, people with a deep sense of purpose about them, and some of them have been in the profession well before I was even born. They’ve been prodigious well before computers replaced typewriters, well before the world was swept into a quagmire of technological innovations that redefined life for the rest of us, a time when squiggling a prescription by hand in hieroglyphics was the norm, the culture and tradition that bred the sagacious absurdity that can hold a quivering human heart in hand and stitch it back in a chest to save a precious life. In my experience, I have found them to be literate saints who exude a mollifying reassurance that puts one at ease in the flash of a second far above the dictates and confines of the electronic gadgetry that is devoid of soulful effervescence, to say the least. I mean, if you think about it there’s not much one can say to an EKG monitor!

Having said this, we can now begin to see why these beacons of luminosity would hesitate to adopt EHRs in their everyday routine. The extravagant heritage of the classic way of doing things makes them reluctant to adapt to a completely new code of conduct. But then again, being the harbingers of faith and optimism they adapt, they evolve, and they learn. They rise up to the occasion and allow modern EHRs like CureMD to redefine the standard and quality of healthcare even when all the syndromic surveillance data that can be measured with the help of an EHR pave the future for a better tomorrow; a utopian world where people age with grace and new cures to several terminal illnesses are discovered at the hands of technological erosion. An idyllic world where a patient’s clinical history becomes an electronic medical record that can be analyzed, evaluated, and applied to save their life.

I know we find it hard to accept change, I know we find it hard to liberate ourselves from the demobilizing shackles of tradition but look at this way, had I not changed my car I would have never learned to drive a car manually. Sometimes, if it’s the wheel that we have to re-invent in order to make the ride smoother, then that’s what it has to be. After all, when Da Vinci proposed the rough illustration of the world’s first helicopter some 5 centuries ago, people thought him to be a lunatic.