HealthIT

Health IT (information technology) is the area of IT involving the design, development, creation, use and maintenance of information systems for the healthcare industry. Automated and interoperable healthcare information systems are expected to lower costs, improve efficiency and reduce error, while also providing better consumer care and service.

EHR Usability: It is NOT a training issue

In a recent blog post by John Lynn, (of Healthcare Scene fame) , John discusses the irony of the following two statements:

  • EHR Training Improves EHR Satisfaction and
  • Physicians Don’t Want to Make Time for EHR Training

Many, many times in our usability evaluation and design career when a development team isn't really interested in making enhancements to fix specific issues that we've identified, we've heard something like the phrase, "There is nothing wrong with the user interface, it is a training issue."

A Bad UX can cause Death by 1000 cuts

The ISO 9241 standard presents the definition of usability as Effective Efficient and Satisfying in a specified context of use.

Usability is the most important "ility."

The lack of usability of electronic health records (EHRs) and healthcare IT applications, in general, has been in the news again. A research report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) analyzed voluntary error reports associated with EHR systems and found that problems with EHR usability may have directly resulted in patient harm (Howe JL ; Adams KT ; Hettinger AZ; et al. Electronic health record usability issues and potential contribution to patient harm. JAMA. 2018; 319: 1276-1278).

Let Dr.s be Doctors?

Let's all remember that before Electronic Health Records (EHRs ) were prevalent, medical staff, pharmacists, and others had to struggle to decipher physician's orders, prescriptions and other hand-written (aka. scribbled) text. By using EHRs the burden of entering correct information into a form has fallen back on to the physician.

Still "Let doctors be doctors" they say.

EHRs typically do have a lot of "areas for improvement."

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