An 84-year-old doctor who refuses to use a computer has lost her medical license
Aside from a fax machine and landline telephone, there isn't much technology in the office of physician Anna Konopka, 84.
Instead, her patients' records are tucked into two file cabinets, which sit in a tiny office next door to her 160-year-old clapboard house in New London, N.H. Records are meticulously handwritten, she said. Konopka does have a typewriter; but it's broken, and its parts have been discontinued.
With medicine in the United States becoming increasingly regulated — and as more doctors are expected to keep records electronically — Konopka's style of doctoring had attracted about 25 patients a week. Some had complicated conditions like chronic pain. Some didn't have insurance. Konopka says she would see anyone who can pay $50 in cash.
But she no longer can.
Konopka said she felt forced to surrender her medical license in September after New Hampshire Board of Medicine officials challenged her record-keeping, prescribing practices and medical decision-making, according to court documents.
She said she wonders if her license was in part taken away because of her inability and unwillingness to use technology to diagnose her patients or log her patients' prescriptions as part of New Hampshire's mandatory electronic drug monitoring program. The program, signed into effect in 2014, is an effort to reduce opioid overdoses.
Konopka, who was a licensed medical practitioner for 55 years, insists that patients prescribed painkillers were always given small dosages. If not for her prescriptions, they would be in constant pain, she said.
“The [electronic] system right now, with this opioid war, they have no common sense with what they're doing. Bureaucrats who don't know medicine — they are getting this kind of idea that they can handle this type of pain without narcotics.”
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/11/29/an-84-year-old-doctor-who-refuses-to-use-a-computer-has-lost-her-medical-license/?utm_term=.edbf967e06cc
