I recently learned about a webinar that’s being held to discuss the NIST EHR Usability guidelines that were drafted and published recently. I think it’s great that NIST is reaching out to the community for comment. I’ve written before about how it’s ironic that an EHR Usability document was a 108 page PDF. That didn’t seem usable by EHR vendors to me.
I also find it interesting that HIMSS is hosting the webinar and that they’re the contact person to get in. You can see the registration link here. You have to be approved to see the webinar. I’m not sure how strict they’ll be with who they let in and who they don’t let in.
Here’s the details of the EHR Usability webinar:
Topic: Technical Evaluation, Testing and Validation of the Usability of Electronic Health Records (Draft NISTIR7804)
Date and time: Thursday, October 27, 2011 2:00 pm
Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)
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Duration: 1 hour
Description: Overview of NIST Usability Guidance
Presenters: Lana Lowry, Usability Scientist, Lead NIST Health IT Usability Program; Emily Patterson, Assistant Professor, Ohio State University and Robert M. Schumacher, Ph.D. Managing Director, User Centric, Inc.Agenda:
Guidelines for Improving Usability: Proposed EHR Usability Evaluation Protocol
Lana Lowry, Ph.D., NISTGuidelines for Improving Usability: Proposed EHR Usability Evaluation Protocol
Robert Schumacher, Ph.D., Managing Director, User CentricThe Relationship between Health IT Usability and Patient Safety: Towards an EHR Usability Safety Framework
Emily S. Patterson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Ohio State UniversityThe Process for Submitting Protocol Comments to NIST
Lana Lowry, Ph.D., NISTComments from Participants
We’ll be on the same call today. Let’s share notes after:)
Did I say I’d be on the call? 😉 I guess I’ve been to too many conferences lately. I need to catch up on stuff. So, I probably won’t make this call. I look forward to reading your notes and likely others’ notes though.
My understanding via the HIMSS usability task force is that this RFC they’ve put out will be the basis for upcoming meaningful use stage 2 criteria around usability.
See my whitepaper “9 Usability Mistakes Your Team Is Probably Making (And How To Fix Them)” to further clarify what concrete issues exist in EHR systems and their root causes http://tinyurl.com/7n7rksg
I’ve long argued usability was a much greater barrier to widespread adoption than most Health IT organizations were thinking. Now that we’re making some degree of progress on interoperability, HIEs, etc. from my perspective it’s nice to see the industry putting more attention on this important issue.