Do doctors fear new technology?
• David Topps, Assistant Professor University of Calgary, Canada Richard Smith, in his editorial in this issue, points out that medicine has been the last of the major industries to adopt information technology. Professor Lorenzi, in this article, shows us how to think about the stages of change in adopting new technology. But this leaves me with the unsettled feeling that they are both still subscribing to the view that doctors’ fear of new technology is the major barrier to its implementation in the medical arena. A decade ago, the technology was clearly not up to the task of efficiently handling the complexities of the medical record but in the last few years, I increasingly hear vendors of medical software proclaiming that software and hardware are no longer the barrier. Indeed, I embraced this view and used it as a carrot to entice my colleagues into taking on this challenge. Now that we have gone through the process, and looking back on the enormous amount of time and effort that
