I can type quite well. I can also troubleshoot minor IT issues. Neither is a better use of my time than seeing patients.

I’m in an unusual situation as an anesthesiologist; I don’t have a clinic to worry about, so my rate-limiting factor isn’t me, it’s the surgeon. EMR is extremely helpful for me because 90% of my preop workup is based on documentation, and EMR not only makes that easy but lets me do it while I still have the previous patient under anesthesia. I actually need to talk to 95% of patients for about 30 seconds, no more.

But my wife is primarily a thinking rather than doing doctor, and while she can type well, why in the hell do we want doctors being typists for dictation of their exams? Yes, back in the old days, doctors did it by hand, but they also wrote things like “exam normal” for a well-baby visit. You can’t get paid for that today; you have to generate a couple of paragraphs that say “exam normal”.

Incidentally, as for cloud service, if your hospital uses Epic, your patients’ info is already shared, so security is already out of your hands.