Checking the Right Boxes but Failing the Patient

I enjoyed this piece from a doc at UC San Diego. Here's an excerpt.

None of these interventions [electronic records/prescriptions, pay-for-performance, etc.], however well meant, address a fundamental problem that is emerging in modern medicine: a change in focus from treating the patient toward satisfying the system. The effects of focusing physicians’ attention on benchmarks and check boxes are not, I think, to the patient’s advantage.

I have heard nearly those same words from many, many physicians. The essence is that they know things are changing, but they feel like they are losing the critical human-to-human interface. Most efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care have created an increasingly worrisome gap between doctor and patient.

No physician I know claims to be smarter than the volumes and volumes of clinical evidence available. Most feel like the well-meant (and often successful) interventions to improve patient care don't serve doctors' ability to help their patients, but require that doctors serve them. And in a world where doctor attention is finite, this matters.

The question, then, I see them raising is: couldn't these interventions have been (and can't future ones be) designed in such a way that they both improve the quality and safety of care, and also increase the amount of time and attention docs can give their patients, rather than putting the two imperatives at odds?