The Data-Only Delusion
Informatics is a behavioral science.
The data won’t save you. But a shared definition of what that data means just might. A serialized essay project by Dr. William Toth, MD, MS — physician executive, clinical informaticist, and student of the most glitch-prone processor in healthcare: the human brain.
The thesis
We built the pipes. We forgot the plumber.
We’ve spent a decade building the pipes, standardizing the languages, and polishing the dashboards until they shine. We told healthcare that if we just make the data good enough, the decisions would take care of themselves.
We were wrong. The failure isn’t in the algorithm. It’s in the most glitch-prone processor in the system: the human brain. When a dashboard says Green and the clinical floor is screaming Red, that isn’t a technology problem. It’s a cognitive one. We’ve fallen in love with the proxy — the metric — and ignored the proximity — the patient.
The Data-Only Delusion is what happens when organizations mistake dashboards for insight, metrics for truth, and compliance for care. Informatics isn’t a math problem. It’s a behavioral science — and the sooner clinical leadership treats it that way, the sooner we stop building expensive solutions for problems that never actually existed.
The essay series
Four series. One argument.
Series 1 · Published
The Psychology of Informatics
The cognitive biases that live inside every dashboard, every CDS alert, and every clinical decision — and what to do about them. From the Framing Effect to the Cobra Effect.
8 essays · Read Series 1 →
Series 2 · Published
The Sociology of Informatics
How medical training, institutional hierarchy, corporate incentives, and EHR interface design systematically condition clinicians to value data over patients.
5 essays · Read Series 2 →
Series 3 · Coming Soon
Knowledge Is Power
From diagnosis to prescription. How clinical leaders build knowledge architectures that survive contact with human reality.
Series 4 · Coming Soon
Addicted to Data (Performance)
What performance culture gets wrong about metrics, measurement, and the difference between a number and a result.
About the author
Dr. William Toth, MD, MS
Physician executive with 20+ years leading clinical informatics at scale — from the Air Force Medical Readiness Agency, where he directed informatics strategy for 400,000 EHR users and 9.6M patients, to his current role as Chief Medical Information Officer at Koniag Government Services, supporting Indian Health Service EHR modernization. Board-certified in Clinical Informatics and Pediatrics.
Connect
These ideas are meant to start conversations, not end them.
Most of the discussion happens on LinkedIn. Come disagree with me there.