MEDICAL USERS SOFTWARE EXCHANGE
2006 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ORLANDO, FLORIDA
2 JUNE, 2006 / 8:00 A.M.

Thank you, Alan for that very kind, very generous introduction. After an introduction like that, the wisest thing may just be to say “Thank you very much, and best wishes for the rest of your conference.” But I will persevere, and I hope that you will, too.

Good morning! I want to thank all of you for having me here with you today in Orlando. In the time we have together this morning, I’d like to talk with you a bit about the news…and also about technology, and how this relates to the work that each of us does.

Now, I know there are a lot of you in this room today who have a great deal of technical expertise—from the fields of medicine, to finance, to computers. In fact, I asked Alan how I’d be able to tell the IT people among you from all the doctors and nurses, and he told me, “If they think you can cure anything by turning it off and then on again…they’re IT.”

But with all the brainpower in this room, I hope you’ll bear with me—especially as my flight, due to various misadventures with New York traffic and New Jersey weather, arrived in Orlando about three hours ago. And as we have this talk, it’s important to me that you know, that I am not any kind of expert, technical or otherwise

Trust me, you don’t want me talking to you about medical software. But as I said, I would like to say a few words about the news, because I believe strongly that the way that the news gets reported is something in which every citizen of a democratic nation has a vested interest—and hopefully has an actual interest as well.

First, though, I’d like to ask you to indulge me for a moment, because it just isn’t in me to stand here before you on this beautiful Florida morning and not give a thought to the men and women in the uniform of the United States and Canada and Great Britain—I realize there are some Canadians and Britons with us this morning—who stand in harm’s way at this moment, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if you’d join me in pausing, for just a moment, to have them with us in our thoughts, as they go about their difficult and dangerous work.

Thank you.

We meet here this morning fast on the heels of a Memorial Day that will stick in my mind, and catch in my throat, for a long time. Official holidays of remembrance probably pass by our culture too easily, as a chance for a three-day weekend, a barbecue, and not much else. But they always hit harder when our nation is at war, and this Memorial Day may have hit harder than any since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

On a professional and personal level, it was a day on which three seasoned combat journalists, two of whom I knew and know well, got caught up in the violence that, more and more, characterizes the situation on the ground in Iraq. Two of them—cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, were killed. One, CBS News war correspondent Kimberly Dozier, is now fighting for her life in a military hospital in Germany.

This was devastating news for me and my colleagues, and for the craft of journalism. It represents yet another blow, a big one, against the ability of the American public and the world to get the full story of what is happening in Iraq. I want to talk more about these things in just a moment.

But first I should step back and try to give a more complete picture of the day when these personal and professional losses took place.

When they were hit, Paul, James, and Kimberly were working on a news piece about how American soldiers were passing Memorial Day on the ever-shifting Iraqi front. They were embedded with a unit of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, on a joint U.S.-Iraqi security patrol. The unit, traveling through central Baghdad, stopped at one point, and the three of them stepped out of their armored Humvee. It was the wrong place at the wrong time. A vehicle packed with explosive detonated right alongside them, killing Paul and James along with a soldier and an Iraqi translator, and wounding Kimberly and six others.

On that same day, 12 Iraqis died and 25 were wounded in a noontime car bombing outside a mosque in a Sunni Muslim section of north Baghdad.

Meantime, across the Tigris River, at least seven others died and 20 were wounded when a bomb planted in a parked minivan exploded at the entrance to an open-air market in a mainly Shiite Muslim part of Iraq’s capital.

And at least 25 other people were killed in bombing and shooting attacks elsewhere in the country. It was a day that saw the bloodshed in Iraq escalate, but it was nonetheless just a part of a larger trend of truly horrific violence in that country. Violence that still includes seemingly random acts of terrorism like the bombs that go off in crowded marketplaces and restaurants, but violence that, more and more, targets its victims with care—targets coalition troops along with people such as Iraqi security forces, Iraqi police, and those perceived as aiding the U.S. occupation or the Iraqi government in any way. Violence that also chooses its targets according to ethnicity and religion.

It may not be widely known, but it has become routine for morgues in Baghdad to take delivery of dozens of bodies at a time—bodies bearing the unmistakable marks of systematic execution.

The violence has continued, in this stepped-up fashion, throughout this week. As bad as Monday was, Tuesday was worse. The month ended with an Iraqi civilian death toll for May that probably stands somewhere well over 900.

As I say all this, I will caution that I think we should all be wary of anyone who tells you they know how Iraq will turn out, whether their scenario is of the best-case or worst case variety. The truth is that nobody knows what will happen in Iraq, or what the war’s regional effects will be, one year, five years, or 10 years out.

This new eruption of violence that started this weekend obscured some other news from Iraq, news of genuine importance—the confirmation by the Iraqi parliament of the new Iraqi government. For the first time since the U.S. invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has a democratically-elected, permanent (as opposed to interim) government in place. We—the United States—may also, finally, have the right ambassador in place in Iraq, in the person of Zalmay Khalilzad, an expert on the region who has received generally high marks from most parties concerned.

Our U.S. man in Baghdad seems cautiously optimistic about the new Iraqi government and its determination to turn around the drift and missed opportunities that characterized the interim government that it is replacing. And it is not insignificant, as the White House has pointed out several times now, that the insurgency now has as its enemy a popularly-elected Iraqi government.

But we have seen so many so-called turning points in this war come and go—the capture of Saddam, the killing of his sons, the handover of sovereignty, the elections—seen them come and go and seen the violence there only get worse, that even the White House seems reluctant to stake too much on this new, historic development for Iraq. One of the reasons for their concern is the fact that the government was confirmed with several crucial posts left still unfilled, including those of Defense Minister and Interior Minister.

These are the key security posts. And it may not be an exaggeration at this point to say, as they go, so may also go Iraq. Under the Iraqi interim government, the Interior Ministry came under a cloud as a suspected center of sectarian violence, executions, and revenge killings. Now, as the conflicts between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds threaten to tear Iraq apart, how this post is filled may be as good a measure as you’re likely to get as to whether the Iraqi center can hold.

Further, the White House policy toward when U.S. troops can leave Iraq remains one of “As they stand up, we’ll stand down”--“they” being Iraqi security forces. Maybe you saw President Bush’s recent joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When pressed on the question of how to measure the progress of the Iraqi military in “standing up,” President Bush cited the unfilled Iraq Defense post as a problem, saying, quote, that “It’s hard to have a command and control system with an Iraqi army when you don't have a defense minister.” Perhaps significantly, Memorial Day was also the day on which the Pentagon announced it would be sending several thousand more U.S. reserve troops from a base in Kuwait to Iraq’s troubled Anbar province.

Well, if you’ve ever wondered why most people choose to watch hard news in the evening, instead of the morning, I suspect you now have your answer. And I promise that it is not my intention to make any of you want to just go back to bed and crawl under the covers. But Iraq, as I said, has been particularly high up in my mind this week. And as unpleasant as some of the news from that part of the world may be, I do not think that any of us can any longer shy away from it or from the conversation about just what we as a nation are going to do about it.

We live, as I hope I have not made too abundantly and depressingly clear, in a challenging world, in difficult times. Yet much the same could be said—and has been said—about virtually any other point in human history. We may need reminding from time to time, but we also live in an era of virtually unrivalled opportunity, and promise. An age in which the engines of technological progress are moving with unprecedented speed. Consider, if you will: A hundred-and-fifty years ago, the fastest thing on earth was a horse at full gallop. Then it was a locomotive…then, in the short span of a century, an automobile, an airplane, a rocket.

There are times when it seems as if our greatest challenge may be figuring out just how to best harness the array of technology available to us.
Although you work in and around the medical profession, and I work in the news, I suspect that our feelings on this subject are not all that different. What we have in common is a deep dedication to what we do, rooted in a firm belief and understanding that it needs doing. We go about our work all too aware that we live in trying times, for our respective callings and for the world.

Journalists, for our part, worry about the state of the news, about our ability to reach the citizens of our democracy with the stories that they need to know about, stories that are not always easy to tell, in all their complexity. Stories that may not be as titillating as the latest celebrity trial but which are so much more important to our lives.

And whether you work in the IT department of a hospital, or in administration, whether you are a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, or a lab technician—you are contributors and members of what may be, when you bottom-line it, the most important profession of all. I and other rank-and-file citizens are aware that you are doing your work, today, amid some of the most difficult circumstances we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Most of you toil on the front lines of America’s insurance crisis. You must cope with the changes in Medicare. You are the ones pointed at when things go wrong—and you are the ones who too seldom receive enough credit for the vast majority of times when things go right.

Amid all this background noise, you and the people you work with also face the full gamut and onslaught of today’s and tomorrow’s public health challenges. The AIDS pandemic. The enormous, worldwide threat posed by avian flu. The twin American epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Not to mention the pressures, the call for constant vigilance, posed by the post-9/11 world—and the terrible possibility of mass-casualty terrorist attacks.

The 20th century may well go down in history’s page as the bloodiest that humanity has known. But it was also a century that could be marked, with equal accuracy, as one of almost miraculous progress in medical treatments. You know, I’m sometimes asked: “What’s it like to be famous?” And my stock answer, in all honesty, is that I don’t consider myself famous. I am well-known, because I am on television. The person that, more than any other, stands in my mind as possessing and deserving fame in the truest, most classical sense, is Dr. Jonas Salk. We stand in the wake of a century of medical progress, forged by a veritable parade of men like Dr. Salk. We have conquered and tamed some of the most insidious killers known to man, and we can now do so much to improve the quality of human life that was once, nearly universally, nasty, brutish, and short.

But all of you, like those of us in the news, also now find yourselves in the midst of the 21st century’s great technological revolution, the information revolution. And it really is a revolution, because it represents a complete inversion of our relationship to information and knowledge. Since the very birth of humanity, information has been arguably the most precious commodity of all. It has been hard-won and rare, for the overwhelming span of our existence as a species. But now, suddenly, in the span of little more than a generation, our greatest problem is no longer how to gather and hold on to information but, instead, it has become the opposite: How to craft something meaningful from a mountain of information that, with its sheer weight and volume, threatens to bury us all.

And I think that all of you are perhaps uniquely aware of the ways in which individual pieces of information—as valuable as they each may be—can be woefully incomplete without context. That is why you are here today, why you put so much effort into trying to integrate information with the software you use. You, like so many of us in all walks of life, are trying to find a way to best drink from the information fire-hose. You are trying to ensure that you do not end up serving the technology but rather that the technology serves you. And because of the importance, the essential nature of what you do—that it ultimately serves all of us.

I would not put the work of journalism up against the work of those who directly hold lives in their hands. But I do believe, and believe strongly, that news—and the quality of news—also has the capacity to affect individual lives, and the collective fates of nations and our planet, in a profound way.
When I think about the challenge that we as journalists face in trying to make sense of the informational flood, for ourselves and for our audience, I often think of it in these terms: As important as any individual piece of information may be, information is not a story.

Given the enormous challenges—and opportunities—we as a world must face and try to seize, the ability to tell a coherent story, to craft and appreciate a compelling narrative in all its detail and complexity, whether about Iraq or about a patient in the intensive care unit, seems more and more to me to be a thing of paramount value, and something that neither journalists nor society can afford to lose as we try to negotiate this vast thicket of information.

How important are stories?

It was a story that first ignited my own passion for the news, a story that I heard as a boy, when I was confined to my bed for long months with rheumatic fever: It was the story, on the radio, that was told nightly by Edward R. Murrow (maybe you’ve seen the movie Good Night and Good Luck; well, this story was told years before Murrow was on television). It was the story Murrow told, in nightly installments, from the streets and rooftops of London while it was being bombed relentlessly by the German Luftwaffe, in the early days of World War II. It was, of course, a true story, but in Murrow’s telling it was more fascinating and clear and unpredictable than any of the fictional stories then on the radio.

And because Murrow told the story so well, told it not as a series of isolated factoids but with gripping detail and human compassion, it was a story that very well may have saved the world. Had the story not been told with such consummate skill and such a sense of immediacy, had the story not been received with such sympathy, it is fair to ask whether the United States would have understood the plight of Great Britain early and well enough to have helped make a difference in that battle. And if England would have fallen to Hitler’s air force and armies, it is not hard to see how history could have taken a very different and terrifying turn.

Stories are important. And, all humility aside, I believe the news is the most important story of all, because it is the story of the present—the story of what is happening in our world, right now.

And what I like to bear in mind, amid all the technological change we are trying to negotiate today, is that Edward R. Murrow was doing much the same, in his day. Radio was, hard as it may be to imagine now, the, quote, “new media” of Murrow’s era. And we can all be thankful that he found a way to put this technology to its best use, to make it serve us.

I’ve been thinking about how we might best use the tools that progress has given us, and the perils of letting them use us, ever since I spent a few days, last month, at a convention for the American broadcasting industry. It was a convention where some of the biggest stars, and the most breathless topics of conversation, were the fruits of technological progress—innovations such as broadband Internet, digital, high-definition television, satellite radio, and podcasts.

I came away from that convention with a mix of emotions. One, I’ll admit, was jealousy: These are amazing technologies, and part of me is envious of the tools that the next generation of journalists will have at their disposal for gathering and reporting the news. But I was also left with a certain sense of unease.

It made me think, in a way, of the proverbial fishing concern that builds a tremendous new cannery on the shore, complete with the latest, gleaming, state-of-the-art equipment. A cannery so big and complex that some of the fishermen have to come off their boats and put down their nets in order to operate it. And then, one day, the foreman of that cannery wonders why, despite all the new equipment in the factory, they aren’t catching as much fish as they once did, and the fish they are catching aren’t as big as the ones they used to catch. Perhaps you can see how that analogy might also apply to the workplace you know.

And this brings me back to the news from Iraq that hit me so hard at the beginning of this week. Those journalists—Paul Douglas, James Brolan, and Kimberly Dozier—were still out there doing the fishing. Why did they do it, under such dangerous conditions? Because they believed in the work, believed in the importance of the story and the need to tell it. To tell it well and completely. Two of them gave their lives in fulfillment of that belief, and a third fights for her life for the same reason.

As I said earlier, I see similarities in what each of us do. The worlds of medicine and journalism can be very personally and professionally rewarding. They can also be, on the worst of days, a tremendous slog through drudgery, bad coffee, and sleep deprivation. In both cases, if you enter the work without a strong sense of calling, you do so at your own peril.

I don’t think it is a coincidence, either, that both medicine and news are central, common, shared institutions in a society, with which everyone has contact, at one time, or another, and about which everyone ought to take an interest. A healthy person who doesn’t work in a hospital may not think he or she has very much interest in the ins and outs of the medical profession, but if that same person gets sick, these things have a way of suddenly becoming very important indeed. By the same token, the proverbial man on the street, even one who reads newspapers or watches the news, may not think he or she cares much about how news gets made. But I humbly submit that she should—when one considers that our democratic form of government absolutely depends on citizens getting the most important information, getting it with context and complexity, and then acting accordingly.

You’ve been very patient listening to me at this early hour and I really appreciate it. And I want to leave a good amount of time to try to answer any questions you may have but before I do, I want to make a pitch for all of you to support, when and where you find it, quality news of integrity. To demand it, when and where it is absent, and to tune in to those who are telling the full story of our world and are telling it well, and to act accordingly.

And in your own work, in the time remaining to you at this conference and when you return home to jobs that touch on so many aspects of our lives, I hope you will come to terms with the technology at your disposal in a way that puts the greatest premium on what each of you, as people—as individuals with a calling, have to contribute. I hope that you will continue to find ways to let technology serve you, without becoming servants of technology.

In the spirit of celebrating the irreplaceable human qualities that each of you bring to what you do, in recognition of all that each of you do for your respective communities…and finally, as a tonic, perhaps, to the grim news with which I opened, I’d like to end by sharing with you a bit of a poem (for which, as with so many things, I am indebted to my daughter Robin). It is called Ode, by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, and I offer it in dedication to the work you are doing to make your world a better place.

We are the music makers
We are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea breakers
Sitting by desolate streams
World lovers and
World foresakers
On whom the pale moon beams
But we are the movers and shakers of the world
Forever
it seems.

Thank you very much.