The following appeared a few days ago.
5 health IT insiders offer their takes on EHR usability
By Bernie Monegain, Editor
Created 09/17/2012
EHR usability is suddenly front and center, now that usability testing is part of the EHR certification criteria for meaningful use Stage 2. We talked with diverse industry insiders for their take on what is critical to user-centric design and what the usability factors might mean to healthcare and to the healthcare IT market. Here is a sampling of some of the topics on their minds.
- Data entry. The biggest complaint is data entry, says JiaJie Zhang, director of the ONC’s SHARP project, charged with finding ways to make EHRs easier to use. “Nobody wants to become a data-entry clerk,” Zhang says. “Their job is to take care of patients, and data entry so far is not optimized. It involves many, many issues here. It is basically the repetition. If you enter this one here, you have to enter it again in a different place. It should be automatic.”
- Errors. “There is unprecedented interest in EHRs by physician community – driven by meaningful use – there’s no question about that,” says Robert Tennant, senior policy advisor for the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). However, physicians are worried they might select a product that turns out to be hard to use, and take away from the time they spend with patient, he says. “I really think it’s a good step for ONC to start pushing the vendors toward more user-friendly systems," he adds, "because if they’re not easy. It slows the clinician down. It can frustrate them. It could lead to errors."
The other points are found here:
We also had this appear.
It's time to publicly compare EHR usability, IOM group says
September 20, 2012 | By Julie Bird
The world of electronic health records needs to open itself up to critical comparisons and earnest user evaluation if it wants to avoid formal regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, according to a discussion paper released this month by the Institute of Medicine.
Not only is there nowhere for health IT users to share publicly their experiences with different products, but vendors often prohibit users from sharing screenshots or otherwise publicly discussing EHR problems, notes the paper, "Comparative User Experiences of Health IT Products: How User Experiences Would Be Reported and Used."
The result, according to the discussion group?
"After a decade of development and experience, EHRs and other health IT products have not advanced sufficiently; nor have they been adopted widely and enthusiastically, in step with other consumer products such as smartphones and iPads," wrote the authors, convened by the IOM to analyze the issue. "With EHRs, unlike other consumer product areas, there has been little opportunity for cross-vendor comparison, which has stifled the evolution of this technology."
More here:
Here are the links provided:
Sadly it would be hard to say the present NEHRS / PCEHR has followed all that has been suggested here. A dinosaur would be closer to the mark.
David.
1 comment:
Useability is of course important, but there is a more significant issue at play here: Doctors have to get over themselves and the fact that part of their job involves entering data such that their behaviour and performance can be scruitinised. In part, this will require that they get used to the idea of being data entry clerks, just like all the lawyers and engineers who suffer the same indignant consequence of transparency.
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