EHR Usability | EMR and EHR

User Experience is Hot HIT Topic with Good Reason

User experience in the world of healthcare IT has never been a hotter topic. It seems not a day goes by that I don’t come across an article, blog, tweet, or outright rant regarding the state of user friendliness, especially with regard to EMRs. (Who can forget the American Medical Association’s note earlier this year to Farzad Mostashari, peppered with complaints about physician usability of EMRs?) I see plenty of negative coverage around the topic – plenty of folks like to have a soapbox to stand on, after all.

I don’t, however, see enough coverage devoted to businesses and providers working to make the backlash better. Surely there are unsung heroes out there in the world of HIT UX that are at their drawing boards right now, attempting to take the sting out of those extra clicks, and listening with bated breath to providers’ complaints and praises.

I came across one such story in New Orleans a few months ago, where, like many of you, I tried to successfully drink from the fire hose (bottled water, actually) that was HIMSS13. I was able to sate my thirst for good UX news at the PointClear Innovation Awards breakfast, which honored a select group of the company’s clients for their work in the realm of user experience.

McKesson took home top honors this year, and while I had some knowledge of their work in the area, I didn’t realize how great of an emphasis they have placed on making sure their healthcare IT solutions are used in the most optimal way for the best possible patient outcomes.

“The big dynamic we are trying to tackle is around critical decision makers,” explains Bobby Middleton, Executive Director, Enterprise Intelligence Product Management at McKesson. “Through experience with our customers and continued research, it is becoming very obvious that our healthcare leaders are often put in a position to make critical decisions without pertinent, relevant and timely information.

“Our Enterprise Intelligence solutions are all geared around providing the right information to the right person at the right time,” he adds. “Our User Experience research is being used to make sure the targeted offering we are delivering via these solutions help a specific set of critical decision makers make the right decision. It is going great so far, and really allowing our technology teams to connect with their end consumers.”

I wonder if we’ll start to see more positive publicity of efforts like McKesson’s, especially as Stage 2 draws closer, more and more providers consider switching to more mature EMRs, and next year’s predicted influx of the newly insured start to clamor for greater digital engagement options and price transparency. One less click or toggle may just make all the difference when it comes to quality patient care.

One Doctor’s EMR Usability Wish List

In this space, we talk a lot in the abstract about how physicians feel about EMR usability. Today, though, I wanted to share with you some great observations from a KevinMD.com piece by an angry anesthesiologist who lays out her own usability wishlist for EMRs and health IT generally.

In the piece, Dr. Shirie Leng fumes over the sheer work it takes for her to negotiate the systems she uses at her hospital. She notes that over the course of doing eight cases during a day, she’ll a) sign something electronically 32 times, b) type her user name and password into three different systems a total of 24 times and c) generate about 50 pages of paper given that the the computer record must be printed out twice.

To Dr. Leng, there’s ten steps institutions can take to eliminate much of the hassle and waste:

1. Eliminate user names and passwords: She suggests using biometric sign-in technology.

2. Eliminate the paper: Why print data that’s already entered into the system, she asks?

3. Make data systems compatible and 4. Make everyone statewide use the same system: Dr. Leng says it’s crazy that we don’t have interoperability within hospitals or between different institutions.

5. Don’t make her turn the page: “All the important information about a patient should be on the first page you open when you look at a patient,” she says. “I shouldn’t have to click six different tabs.”

6. Don’t make her repeat herself: If she does several cases the same way, with the same documentation each case, don’t make her re-enter it every single time.

7. Invest in voice-recognition software: During patient interviews, Dr. Leng notes, she wants to look at patients and talk, not hunt and peck at the keyboard or worse, spend hours later typing in data or clicking checkboxes.

8. Go completely wireless: Not an EMR point, but a good one nonetheless: why make doctors untangle cords and monitoring wires?

9. Hire a typist if you need one: Don’t turn nurses into data entry clerks, she argues. Right now they have massive amounts of data entry piled onto their plate.

10. Triple back-up the system: Paper doesn’t crash but computers do, she notes.

So there you have it, a list of EMR and health IT concerns straight from a practicing physician. I think all her points deserve attention.

Improving the EHR Interface and Topol Saves Patient’s Life on Flight Home

As I thought through my day at HIMSS, a theme started to emerge from all the dozens of meetings I’ve already had at the show (with many more still to come). The theme I saw coming out was ways to improve the EHR interface. This is a much needed change in EHR’s, so it was interesting to see a whole series of companies working on ways to make the EHR interface better. Here are some of the highlights from companies I talked to at HIMSS.

SwiftKey – While the SwiftKey product can be used in the consumer space as well, it was interesting to see the technology applied to healthcare. SwiftKey is basically a replacement for your mobile device keyboard. In fact, I’d call SwiftKey a smart keyboard for your mobile device. What does it do to make your mobile device keyboard smart?

First, it offers word suggestions you can easily choose as you start to type. Most people are familiar with this base functionality because it exists in some form in most mobile keyboards (or at least it does on my Android). However, they’ve taken it a couple steps further. They actually use the context of what you’ve typed to predict what word you may want to type next. For example, if you type, “nausea and” then it predicts that you’ll want to type vomiting. If you type “urinary” then it will predict tract and then infection. Plus, they told me their algorithm will also learn your own colloquial habits. Kind of reminds me of Dragon voice recognition that learns your voice over time. SwiftKey learns your language habits over time.

I’m sure some of these predictive suggestions could lead to some hilarious ones, but it’s an interesting next step in the virtual keyboards we have on mobile devices. I’ll be interested to hear from doctors about what they think of the SwiftKey keyboard when it’s integrated with the various EHR iPad apps.

M*Modal and Intermountain – Thinking back on the demos and products I’ve seen at HIMSS 2013, I think that the app M*Modal has created for Intermountain might be the coolest I’ve seen so far. In this app, a doctor would say an order for a prescription, and the M*Modal technology would apply voice recognition and then parse the words into the appropriate CPOE order fields. It was pretty impressive to see it in action. Plus, the time difference between speaking the order and trying to manually select the various order fields on the mobile device was incredible.

I was a little disappointed it was only a demo system, but it sounds like Intermountain is still doing some work on their end to make the CPOE happen. I’m also quite interested to see if a simple mobile app like this will see broad adoption or if more features will need to be added to get the wide adoption. However, it was almost like magic to see it take a recorded voice and convert it into 5-7 fields on the screen. I’d be interested to see the accuracy of the implementation across a large set of doctors, but the possibilities are quite interesting for transforming the CPOE interface.

Cerner Mobile – One of the new Cerner ambulatory EHR features is an iPad interface for the doctor. I’m sure that many will think this is old news since so many other iPad EHR interfaces are out there. In some ways it is, but there was a slickness to their app that I hadn’t seen a lot of places. In fact, the demo of their ambulatory EHR iPad app reminded me a lot of the features that I saw in this video Jonathan Dreyer from Nuance created (bottom video) that demonstrated some of the mobile voice capabilities. Plus, the app had a nice workflow and some crazy simple features like doing a refill. One swipe and the med was refilled. Almost makes it too easy.

Canon – This is a little different than some of the other EHR interface things I talk about above. In the case of Canon it was interesting to see the tight integration that’s possible between the Canon scanners and EHR software. Instead of the often laborious process of scanning to your EHR and assigning it to a patient, Canon has a scan direct to EMR option including analyzing the cover sheet to have the scanned document attached to the right patient and EHR chart location. While we’d all love to have paper gone, it will be a part of healthcare for the forseeable future. The scan direct to EMR is a pretty awesome feature.

Those are a number of the EHR interface things that I’ve seen so far at HIMSS. I’m sure there are dozens of others out there as well. I think this is a great trend. Sure, each of these things is only a small incremental change, but with hundreds of EHR vendors all doing small incremental changes we’re going to see great things. That’s good, because many of the current EHR interfaces are terribly unusable.

In an related topic, Eric Topol gave a keynote address at HIMSS today. He had glowing reviews from what I could tell. Although, what’s an even more powerful story is to see the message he shared at HIMSS in action. On Topol’s flight home to San Diego a patient was having some medical issue. He did the ECG right on the plane using his smartphone and the passenger was able to make it safely to the destination. You can read the full story here. What’s even more amazing is that this is the second time something like this has happened to Topol. This probably means he flies too much, but also is an incredible illustration of the mHealth technology at work. Truly amazing!

Full Disclosure: Cerner and Canon are advertisers on this site.

Where Are Usability Standards For EMRs?

The other day, I was talking with a physician about ambulatory EMRs. ”None of them are any good,” said the doctor, who’s studied EMRs for several years but never invested in one. “I can’t find a single one that I can use.”

Are any of you surprised to hear him say that? I’m certainly not. Perhaps he’s exaggerating a bit when he says that absolutely none are usable at all, but it’s hard to argue that doctors cope with a counter intuitive mess far too often. And of course, enterprise EMRs get if anything lower usability ratings from practicing doctors.

All of which brings me around to the notion of EMR usability standards, or rather, the lack of such same. While those in the industry talk often about usability, there’s no real consensus standard for measuring how usable a particular EMR is, despite noble efforts by NIST and impassioned advocacy by usability gurus in the field.

Certainly, private research organizations take usability into account when they survey clinicians on which EMRs they prefer. So clunky EMRs with lousy UIs do pay some kind of price when they’re rated by the clinical user. But that’s a far cry from having a standard in place by which medical practices and hospitals can objectively consider how usable their preferred EMR is going to be.

So, why don’t we have usability standards already in place? The market still hasn’t punished vendors whose EMRs are a pain to use, so vendors keep on turning our products built around IT rather than clinical needs. The doctor I spoke with may have opted out of the EMR market, but most providers aren’t going to do that, Meaningful Use incentives being just one reason why. (It’s a “handwriting is on the wall” thing.)

It’s a shame CMS isn’t pushing vendors to produce Meaningfully Use-ABLE EMRs. That might do the trick.

The EHR Has Clothes … At Least Some of Them

I’ve been really falling in love with some of the content that the Health Affairs blog has been putting out there lately. A recent post titled “The EHR Has No Clothes” was no exception. In this incredibly thoughtful post by Barry Saver, he’s not afraid to start a discussion about points that many are afraid to talk about. I like that a lot. Although, I think the post also represents a couple ongoing trends I see in EHR perceptions.

Common EHR Problem 1 – I can’t tell you how many times I ask a doctor how they like their EHR and then they provide me some small facet of the EHR which annoys them. In Barry’s case it’s “Most screens do not show age, date of birth, or medical record number.” While we could delve into the particular feature that Barry mentions, that’s really not the point. The point is that far too often I see users of EMR systems fixating on one particular issue and ignoring the dozens of other items that are better than the paper world. It’s the proverbial throwing out the baby with the bath water.

No doubt I have a little Pollyanna in me. Although, I should be clear that I’m not suggesting that EHR problems shouldn’t be addressed. Please do hold EHR vendors accountable if their software needs changes. I am saying that I see far too many doctors and clinics that get so fixated on one problem that they ignore all the other good things that are possible. There are deal breaking EHR features and their are EHR annoyances that can be fixed. Make sure you know which one you are really dealing with when you see it.

As an interesting sidebar, this same fixation often happens in the EHR selection process. Although, in this case the person selecting the EHR often fixates on some particular feature (valuable or not). For example, they’ll say that they really love the login screen or background color. It’s amazing what little things can have such an influence on our decision making when they shouldn’t matter at all.

Common EHR Problem 2 – I’ll call this problem the mature feature problem. It turns out it’s a fallacy to assume that a mature EHR (ie. one that’s been around for a long time) has had time to fix all the problems. Here’s a short paragraph from the above linked post:

Approving 12 months of refills when I receive an electronic refill request typically takes a combination of 14 mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes – as opposed to four if it were implemented efficiently. The list of items needlessly making it more difficult to provide efficient and effective care would cover many pages. These might seem like issues that could be present in version 1 of a system and then promptly fixed, but we currently have version 5.6.

I’ll save the discussion of mouse clicks and keystrokes for another post since it’s an important one. Instead, let’s focus on the idea that a mature EHR will have worked out all the issues with certain features. While this can definitely be true in the early development of EHR software, the opposite often comes into play as EHR software matures.

When an EHR begins its development life cycle it’s usually only saddled with a very specific task. In fact, you don’t have time to build all the features so you often have to make it really simple because of time constraints. Assuming this meets your workflow, it’s a great thing and you enjoy a wonderfully simple interface. Over time, features continue to be added to the interface. Plus, they have to start supporting all 50+ medical specialties that all have their own specific needs. Quickly, the beautiful EHR interface gets bloated to the point that it can do everything imaginable, but it does nothing really well.

Certainly, the best EHR software vendors know this and battle against it. Although, it really takes a battle to overcome this challenge.

What I find even more ironic is that Barry suggests Vista as the solution to his issues with EHR. At least he admits to never having used it other than the demo client on the web. Certainly Vista has its place in the EHR world and I love that it’s open source and benefiting from that innovation. Although, I think it’s crazy to think that a small doctor’s office is going to implement Vista. I’d love to see Barry do a write up after he adopts Vista.

Does the EHR have no clothes?
I think many EHR companies do have clothes on. I think the real problem is that we need to just stop shopping at the high end stores by the nude beach.

NIST’s EHR Usability Conference Breaks Both Old Ground and New Focuses on EMR Patient Safety Protocol

Regular reader, Carl Bergman from EHR Selector, attended the recent NIST EMR Usability Conference and sent over the following guest post on what was said. Thanks Carl for sharing your experience with us.

A year ago last June I attended NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) conference on EMR/EHRs usability. [See Carl's post on the NIST EHR Usability Conference from 2011.] It was a mixed bag. There were several excellent presentations on the fundamentals of usability, how to analyze an EMR and where the field was headed. Unfortunately, NIST’s staff took a narrow view confining their work to EMR error conditions and assiduously avoiding interface, workflow and clinical setting issues. It was odd that an agency that prided itself on redesigning nuclear control rooms after Three Mile Island or the design of airplane cockpits would ignore EMR user interfaces.

New Approach: New Protocol

At this year’s conference at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD, the past was not prolog. Last week’s conference focus was on a comprehensive EMR usability protocol, NISTIR 7804, that NIST produced last February. (For a good synopsis, see Katherine Rourke’s Design Errors That Cause Patient Harm per NIST.) NIST’s staff pulled together a notable group of speakers on patient safety in general and implementing the protocol in particular. (NIST is posting the presentations here.)

The protocol, designed to review an EMR, is not a trivial undertaking since it has about 180 line item questions. It asks, for example, if the EMR:

Keeps patient identities distinct from each other? That is, does the system prevent one record from writing over another or erroneously sharing data elements?
Lays out pages in a consistent manner using color, icons and links identically?
Uses measurements consistently? That is, if weight is entered in pounds and ounces in one place, do they show that way in other places?
Displays fields fully rather than being truncated?
Sorts logically based on the subject?
Show dosages, etc., with all needed information on the page?
Displays multipage entries or lookups with proper navigation choices?
Has error messages that state what is wrong and how to cure the problem?
Accommodates different levels of user knowledge? That is, does it have extended help for novice users, refresher information for occasional users and short cuts for experienced users?

Developers Present in Force

If NIST’s major intent was to get developer attention, they succeeded. Of the hundred or so attendees, about 20 percent were from major systems. 3m, Allscripts, Athenahealth, Centricity, McKesson, NextGen, etc., each had one or more representatives present. Others present included Kaiser, HIMSS, Medstar, First Choice, ACP, Columbia, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know developer reaction to the protocol. The conference had no comment session. I don’t know if this was by design or if time just ran out. NIST staff did indicate that next year the conference would be two days rather than one. However, a year is a long time to wait for reactions. This is especially pertinent since NIST is not a regulatory agency. Its protocols are strictly voluntary and depend on vendor acceptance.

What NIST did do is offer several presentations that emphasized how fragile patient safety can be in an HIT world. One breakout session used an actual, unnamed product’s screen that had dozens of misleading or ambiguous fields. For example, the screen’s fields cut off drug names, used red to indicate several different findings and used a pop up that blocked a view of a pertinent entry.

In another more broadly based patient safety presentation, University of Pennsylvania’s voluble Ross Koppel drove home how common elements in EMRs such as blood pressure – he’s found 40 different ways to show it so far – are subject to many formats for capture and display. Moreover, if you think EMRs have problems, Koppel shows how bar codes and work arounds can play havoc with workflow and patient safety.

Wanted: One Good Policy Compass

For those of us possessed of an EMR design demon, it was both a good chance to wonder out loud just what it all meant and where, if anywhere, things were headed. Sadly, the most common answer was who knows? There were some common points:

It’s better to have NIST’s protocol than not.
You can forget the FDA playing a bigger role. It’s under funded and over worked.
HIMSS will wait for the industry and the industry has shown no hurry.
EMR adverse incident reporting would be great, but who would do it and how open would it be?

In short, if you’re shopping for an EMR, regardless of your size, don’t count on anyone handing you a usability report on an EMR anytime soon. Moreover, don’t try to run NIST’s protocol on your own unless you have full access to the proposed EMR, lots of time on your hands and a good grasp of the protocols details.

There are some things you can do. You can ask potential vendors questions such as these:

Have they run the NIST protocol and what did they do as a result?
If not NIST, do they have a written usability protocol and, if so, can you see it? How have they implemented it?
Have they tested their EMR’s usability with outside, independent users? What were the results?
Have they used any interface designers?
What usability changes do they plan?

There is no guarantee that you’ll get a great product, but it could mean that you get one that doesn’t bite your patients or you.

Are “User” And “Process” – Centered EMR Design On A Collision Course?

Most of the critiques I read of EMR design ding the EMR for its difficulty to use or its inability to accomodate the workflow of the institution that bought it — and of course, sometimes both. What I’ve never heard suggested, however, is the following idea proposed by Chuck Webster, a guy who clearly doesn’t stop short when he decides to study something. (He’s an MD, an MSIE and an MSIS in intelligent systems design, which is only one of the reasons I think he’s onto something here.)

In a thoughtful and nuanced blog entry, Dr. Webster outlines the work of a pioneer in usability design, Donald Norman, and comes away with the conclusion that the current trend toward “human-centered design” might actually be a mistake. What a pain — health IT limps along catching up with a trend from the 1980s, and now may be too late to catch the bus.

In any event, Dr. Webster argues instead of focusing on human/user-centered design, EMR vendors should be focused on activity- or process-centered design. I love what he says about one of the potential problems with human-centered UIs:

Optimization around a user, or user screen, risks the ultimate systems engineering sin: suboptimization. Individual EHR user screens are routinely optimized at the expense of total EHR system workflow usability…I’ve seen EHR screens, which, considered individually, are jewel-like in appearance and cognitive science-savvy in design philosophy, but which do not work together well.

It’s better, he suggests, to have EMRs model “interleaved and interacting sequences of task accomplishment” first and foremost. For example, he writes, key task collections that should be considered as a whole include workflow management systems, business process management, case management and process-aware information systems.

While there’s much more to say here, of course, I’ll close with Dr. Webster’s words, who once makes his point with wonderful clarity:

User-centered EHR design does help get to good EHRs. Good isn’t good enough. If EHRs and HIT are going to help transform healthcare they need to be better than world-class (compared to what?). They need to be stellar. Traditional user-centered design isn’t going to get us there.

The question I’m left with, readers, is whether you can have your cake and eat it too. Does one side of UI/UX design literally have to be jettisoned to support the other?

Playing the EHR Memory Game

I try to avoid navel-gazing, which to me means commenting on someone else’s commentary – a practice all too commonly relied upon in the healthcare IT blogosphere. How many blogs, articles and rebuttals have been generated, after all, as a result of the Health Affairs/Mostashari back-and-forth in the past few days? Quite a few, and yours truly happily participated in the fringe commentary. So as you can see, sometimes a topic already covered by someone else just begs for a second opinion, which I’ll happily give if the context is right.

Yesterday I came across two pieces of online content that I couldn’t help but draw correlations between. The first, a blog written by Dr. Rick Weinhaus entitled “Humans Have Limited Working Memory,” tells the tale of our poor ability to retain information, made all too obvious by a common EHR design feature – the utilization of a row of clickable tabs at the top of a dashboard to designate the different categories of data that make up the patient visit.

Dr. Rick laments that since humans are capable of only retaining four to five unrelated elements in working memory, the row of one-click tabs, though logical, doesn’t work very well. In fact, it drives him “crazy.”

I certainly believe in our limited capacity for remembering unrelated things at any given time, and I’m sure other working parents will agree. Our capacity for keeping everything straight is finite – the more kids, colleagues, coworkers, patients, tabs, bells and whistles you add, the more likely you are to forget something, leave something behind, or, if you’re like me, leave your car door wide open in a parking lot while grocery shopping with two kids in tow. But I digress.

The second piece of content revolves around the results of a survey put out by CDW Healthcare on what clinicians find frustrating about implementing new health IT systems. Surprise, surprise, “too many passwords to memorize” came in at the top, emphasizing what Dr. Rick pointed out in his unrelated blog post.

So what’s a clinician to do? Especially those that work in multiple facilities on different EHRs? Are you like me, scribbling down usernames and passwords on a master paper document, which just screams “privacy breach waiting to happen?” How are vendors helping to address these issues – single sign-ons? Better, overall design? Whose doing it the right way when it comes to designing an EHR, or as Dr. Rick says, designing one “based on what humans are good at — using our visual system to make sense of the world?”

Please let me know in the comments below.

NIST May Standardize The Cloud, Even If It’s Too Late For EMRs

Over at the august halls of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, researchers have been compiling data on what makes EMRs usable. A year ago, in April 2011, NIST presented a draft set of usability standards. At the same hearing, a wide range of academics and scholars got up to talk about what they saw as they key issues — including whether EMR workflow should be changed to make it cost-efficient.

Since then, from what I can tell, there’s been a lot of noise but little light shed on the design specs a truly usable EMR should adhere to. There’s been some progress in the development of HIE connections between EMRs, some worthwhile work EMR return on investment and even some improvements that might leverage EMRs to help doctors collect more from patients.

Talk to many doctors, and they’ll tell you their EMR stinks. Why? Largely because workflow is still inefficient and the “click burden,” which can drive doctors through a dozen steps to get tasks handled, hasn’t been reduced any too much. Some older docs I’ve spoken with even pine for the rough-hewn EMRs of 20 to 30 years ago more, which were at least built by their colleagues.

Honestly, I don’t expect the “awkward interface” problem to go away anytime soon. But while we stew on this issue, you might be interested to learn that NIST is taking over a few related problems in which it could conceivably make a real difference.

A few months ago, NIST released the 16th and final draft of its recommendations on definition of cloud computing. (Talk about insisting on getting it right!) Not everyone in the health IT industry is even aware that NIST has kicked out a cloud standards document, which our friend Shahid Shah, “The Healthcare Guy,” is urging people to get onto their radar. Maybe this time, NIST has a chance to actually standardize before an industry runs while with its own implementations of key technology.

I think I’ll finish with Shahid’s comments on the subject, as I think he’s pretty clearly got it right:

My strong recommendation to all senior healthcare executives is that we not come up with our own definitions for cloud components – instead, when communicating anything about the cloud we should instruct our customers about NIST’s definition and then tie our product offerings to those definitions. The essential characteristics, deployment models, and service models have already been established and we should use them. When we do that, customers know that we’re not trying to confuse them and that they have an independent way of verifying our cloud offerings as real or vapor.

More On EHR Usability: Let Doctors Decide

Here’s worthwhile some observations on how to drive improvements in EHR usability from Evan Steele, CEO of EMR, practice management and PACS systems vendor SRSSoft. (Just for clarity, SRSSoft serves medical practices.)

While Mr. Steele’s comments may not be wildly original, I always like to see discussions of tricky issues like usability boiled down to a few key points, and he’s done a good job here. His arguments, with my commentary:

* Feedback from physicians and other providers should drive EMR usability improvements.

Of course — shouldn’t the software clinicians work every day with to improve health and save lives be adapted to fit the needs of those clinicians? You can’t offer complete freedom when you’re collecting structured data, but clinicians should be able to bend and stretch things as much as possible.

That of course, begs the question of what’s driving usability models right now, doesn’t it? Certainly, EMR vendors care what clinicians think, but my guess is that the development roadmap has to come first far too often.

Here, let’s pretend I’ve inserted a lengthy rant as to how enterprise software companies in general just don’t connect well with their customers – something that became painfully obvious to me when I worked for one several years ago. Suffice it to say that I doubt clinicians are as involved in vendors’ UI dev, much less feature set specs, as often as they should be.

* Usability measures should embrace not only primary care, but also specialists.

Again, this seems fairly obvious to me, but seemingly, not to federal officials, who, according to Steele, treated specialty needs as an “afterthought” when creating Meaningful Use standards.

In my opinion, it’s become fairly clear that specialty-facing systems are important, and that regulators should address such systems on their own terms. I’ve seen no sign that they’ve developed plans to do so as of yet, though. (Anyone know more than I do on this?)

* Usability shouldn’t be legislated.

For at least a couple of years, there’s been talk of the FDA’s stepping in and imposing usability rules on EMRs; observers say the rules would be akin to those they already do on medical devices and supporting software. (See more on this issue from medical device connectivity expert Tim Gee here.)

Steele, for his part, thinks such regulations would cause problems. Imposing governmental standards on EHR interface “will inevitably accommodate only a narrow range of users, leaving those with varying preferences and workflows without software to satisfy their usability requirements,” he argues.

I’d like to see Steele get his way on the first two suggestions. If EMR interfaces are driven by clinicians and take specialists into account, it’s far less likely that the government will feel obliged to impose itself upon the marketplace.

But if the industry doesn’t do a better job of partnering with clinicians, expect to see the FDA or other agencies step in. Regulators may decide that if the industry can’t produce usable EMRs on its own, predictable, rulebound ones will do.

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User Experience is Hot HIT Topic with Good Reason

One Doctor’s EMR Usability Wish List

Improving the EHR Interface and Topol Saves Patient’s Life on Flight Home

Where Are Usability Standards For EMRs?

The EHR Has Clothes … At Least Some of Them

NIST’s EHR Usability Conference Breaks Both Old Ground and New Focuses on EMR Patient Safety Protocol

Are “User” And “Process” – Centered EMR Design On A Collision Course?

Playing the EHR Memory Game

More On EHR Usability: Let Doctors Decide

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