All of this seems so regimented and impersonal.  Why would my doctor want to work with such a computer system?

Given free choice, your doctor probably did not want to do this.  Early adopters of electronic records systems have experienced chaos in their offices and a slowing down of their work product.  Many physicians have found themselves staying in their office until 8;30 or 9 PM in order to enter all of the data required for them to get paid (no more than they were paid when using paper records) for the office visit .  There are too many clicks that are required to document what transpired at the office visit, and physicians know that all of this additional effort is satisfying an administrator's data collection fantasy while being not very useful clinically for the doctor.  After a few months of practice with an EHR, most physician users don't stay in their offices any later than before; but they wind up doing more work at home.  Early adopters of these systems report that they are spending 4-5 more hours per week with an EHR than they did when they had paper records.

Secondly, these systems are so complicated to maintain and to use, doctors are frustrated because they perceive they don't receive much benefit for the time they spend building, maintaining, and constantly tweaking these systems.  These systems are not user friendly and are not plug and play out of the box.  Doctors need to be their own electronics general contractors to get these things up and running and keeping them working properly.  For most physicians the added time crafting this tool to a semblance of reliability is not worth the extra time taken away from family and personal pursuits.

Thirdly, throughout their medical training, doctors have been taught one way of thinking while computer programmers, administrators, and data processors think differently.  The EHR forces doctors to be scribes who mindlessly generate megabytes of irrelevant facts unselectively when these requirements do not seem natural in the context of medical education and training.  Intellectually, the process of medical diagnosis and management is much like building a pyramid.  The walls get thinner until you get to the apex of the pyramid which represents the most likely diagnosis or the most appropriate treatment.  Building an intellectual pyramid requires progressive sifting through information and progressively rejecting more of it in order to weed out the correct diagnoses and best treatments from the unlikely and the inconsequential facts.  On the other hand, computer programmers intellectually build a large cube or vertical rectangular box.  At the top of the cube or rectangular box you have a horizontal rectangular plane, not a point.  You have just as much surface area at the top of the structure as you had at the base; but you have used a lot more material at a much greater expense.  Furthermore, the pyramid is a stronger structure and less likely to topple than the rectangular box.

Most doctors don't understand why they have to do a lot of things which were never part of their training and practice before.  They don't understand why they have to gather data which is unrelated to their specialty.  They don't understand why they must gather demographic data for unknown researchers at remote locations to analyze when the resulting retrospective studies are mostly observational, uncontrolled, speculative, and inconclusive in their findings because of the inherent flaws associated with this type of experimental design.

Most physicians regard the EHR requirement as nonsense unlikely to improve the outcome of the individual physician seeing the individual patient on any given day.  However, the Economic Stimulus and Recovery Act that Congress enacted in 2009 required physicians to have a certified Electronic Health Record in place and to demonstrate  "meaningful use" of such a system by January 1, 2015.  If a doctor does not have or use such as system, the physician will face payment reductions from Medicare which begin in 2015 and increase in magnitude each year after 2015.