I was waiting for it. The staredown. The showdown. It was me or the machine.

“Lisa … what are you doing, Lisa?” I could hear it saying. I had to trick it into doing what I wanted it to, without it hurtling me into space. (If you little grasshoppers haven’t seen “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for shame! Get thee to Netflix or Vudu, stat!)

You see, we recently went to a new computer system. We’d been using it for tracking for a couple of years, but at the beginning of June, we went to doing everything electronically.

There are some good things about this, and there are bad things.

The good news first, I guess. It’s the shortest – it won’t take long.

Call me crazy, but I actually like putting in my own orders. Now that all my orders are time stamped, I know exactly when I ordered something, so there’s no debate. I also like the fact that my orders and prescriptions are now legible, and I can read what other docs have done. Some handwriting is truly atrocious.

I also like the fact that I know exactly what prescriptions a patient was given in his or her visit to one of our sister hospitals earlier that day.

“Oh, Mr. Smith, you say this is the first time you’ve come to the hospital for your [insert part of the body that hurts here] problem? I see you were at the other hospital, and they gave you 20 Lortab 10s. That was 3 months ago, you say? Hmmm…I don’t know. It says here that it was 3 HOURS ago.” Then I get to tell him in a nice way to get out of my ED so I can take care of people who are actually sick. Oh – and have a nice day. Gotta have that customer satisfaction.

That’s the stuff I like. Now for the meltdowns.

I could see three patients, put in a central line, and reduce a shoulder in the time it takes for this thing to boot up and log me in. This is 2012, people. It was quicker to log into my Apple IIc that I had to work on when I was in high school. The surgeons are really frustrated. They say they could have written pre-op orders and scrubbed by the time they finish logging on. Don’t you just love modern technology?

The first week, I had to have the thing constantly worked on because it would not print. We rotate around to three different hospitals. I mostly work at the suburban one, but occasionally I work at the trauma center. Each time I would change locations, the printer for that location would not load or something. I’m trying to discharge impatient patients, and I cannot print their prescriptions and discharge instructions. And I have a rack full of new impatient patients.

I’m also aggravated that if I write a lab order and then change my mind, I can’t d/c it. I have to call the lab and tell them directly. Apparently, when I d/c a lab test, it doesn’t alert the lab, so they run it anyway. I thought the computer was supposed to help with this! I don’t have time to call the lab every time I want to subtract something. They need to fix this, or I’m going to go batty.

Finally, out of frustration, I started throwing my pen at it, mostly because a brick wasn’t all that handy. I heard one of the surgeons got so mad at it that he ripped one of the screens off the wall of the OR and smashed it. I’m not sure if that’s true or just part of Go Live Lore.

Now, I’m pretty technologically savvy. I grew up with a computer programmer for Pete’s sake. My father, now retired, was a computer programmer for Tulane University in the 1980s, and then he was the budget systems manager. One day he dropped his briefcase, and all these little cards with little holes came pouring out.

I also had to take computer science in high school – programming BASIC on old Apple IIcs. Those things are probably in museums now, along with floppy disks, 8-track players, and the original iPod.

I suppose the biggest frustration with this whole system is that whoever designed it has never worked in an ED, maybe never even been a patient in one.

They should have – at least – had to role play a little. “Excuse me, Mr. Jones, I know your wife’s heart has stopped, but I can’t stay at the bedside with her because I have to electronically enter the epinephrine order to keep her heart from stopping again.”

It seems as though we are spending more time with a computer than with a patient. I’m handcuffed to the computer so I can order all the appropriate tests and medications. I should really be standing next to the patient, constantly reassessing him or her and thinking about the case. History and physical give you 80% of the information you need to diagnose and treat patients. By not standing there and doing this, you will miss something.

According to CMS, if you are a hospital or provider that accepts Medicare, your reimbursement will be “adjusted” if you haven’t converted to electronic medical records by 2015. So this is coming, whether you like it or not. I’ve heard people say they were going to move or change jobs, but unless you leave the medical field, it will catch up with you.

We need to be careful with this for the future. Our new interns and residents are being trained this way, in this frame of mind. Time at the patient’s bedside is the most valuable part of the experience. It’s what the patients will remember about their visit.

I suppose we will just have to adjust. We’ve done it before – it’s not like we’ve not been using computers in health care. However, I feel like this total electronic adoption business will force us to decrease time with our patients and things will get missed.

Medicine isn’t just a science, a set of algorithms that any idiot can follow. It’s an art as well, for it is the partnership between the healer and sufferer that makes our profession great and special. We need to hold on to this, or computers will shut us down and hurtle us into space.

Dr. Bundy is an attending physician at ERMed, LLC, in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist who not only sings in the car but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.