WASHINGTON — Medical student Gregory Shumer studied the electronic health record and scooted his laptop closer to the diabetic grandfather sitting on his exam table. “You can see,” he pointed at the screen — weight, blood sugar and cholesterol are too high and rising.

The man didn’t reveal he was too nearsighted to see those numbers, but he’d quietly volunteered that he’d been ignoring his own health after his wife’s death. The future Dr. Shumer looked away from the computer for a sympathetic conversation, exactly the point of Georgetown University’s novel training program.

As the nation moves to paperless medicine, doctors are grappling with an awkward challenge: How do they tap the promise of computers, smartphones and iPads in the exam room without losing the human connection with their patients? Are the gadgets a boon, or a distraction?

“That’s the tension I feel every day,” said Dr. Vincent WinklerPrins, a family medicine specialist at Georgetown. The medical school is developing one of a growing number of programs to train new doctors in that balancing act, this one using actors as patients to point out the pitfalls ahead of time.

Across the country at Stanford University this summer, medical students will bring a school-issued iPad along as they begin their bedside training, amid cautions not to get so lost in all the on-screen information that they pay too little attention to the actual patient.

Face your patient, excuse yourself to check the screen and put away the gadget when you don’t really need it, say Stanford guidelines that specialists say make sense for physicians everywhere. And, of course, no personal Internet use in front of a patient.

“The promise of these devices to augment the delivery of clinical care is tremendous,” said Stanford’s Dr. Clarence Braddock.

Braddock helped develop Stanford’s standards understanding there are different hurdles. Middle-aged doctors may be less comfortable with the technology and take longer with it. Younger ones who grew up texting while multitasking may not realize how intrusive patients might find the devices. Even Braddock has a confession: To his embarrassment, his phone once beeped an email alert about a sports tournament while he was with a patient.

It’s not just a matter of etiquette. If the doctor spends too much of your 15-minute visit typing or staring at a screen, you have to wonder: What if I have a symptom that just got missed?

Electronic health records, or EHRs, are considered the future of health care for good reason; they can help prevent medical errors. For example, the systems can warn if doctors are about to prescribe a drug that could interact badly with another one the patient already uses. As these computerized charts become more sophisticated, they also have the potential to spur more efficient care: no more getting another X-ray just because you forgot to bring in your last scan if the doctor can call it up digitally.