Robert Wachter, M.D., is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He coined the term "hospitalist" in 1996 and is generally considered the father of the hospitalist field. His sixth book, "The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age," © (McGraw-Hill Business, April 2015, 320 pgs) is available on Amazon and through retail booksellers nationwide. This excerpt is used with the permission of McGraw-Hill Education.