EMR/EHR Usability Heating Up

As anyone who hasn't been under a rock for the past year and a half knows, health care reform is a hot topic. Many have made the argument that reforming the health care system is key to the US's economic recovery, and one of the key ways to realizing that the path to reform is through better use of health care IT systems. President Obama explicitly called this out in his inauguration speech.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's EHR Usability Task Force recently released a white paper focusing on the usability of electronic medical records and declared that the usability of the systems was “one of the major factors and possibly the most important factor hindering widespread adoption of EMRs.” Clearly, there are other important factors at play such as data security and system integration, but ensuring that the systems are intuitive, accurate, efficient, and align with healthcare workers' existing workflows is critical.

Many of us have realized... and would have argued form "the beginning" of EHRs... that understanding the end users and ensuring a positive and productive user experience for EHRs is critical for their adoption and long-term success. The rest of the world is starting to catch up. To my very pleasant surprise, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released a call for information about potential partners in developing a comprehensive framework for understanding the needs of users and developing a framework for rating the usability of all EHRs. I would have liked to see this years ago, but better late than never :-)

As we've seen by the great response to the newly-created Healthcare UX group here, there is clearly a lot of interesting healthcare UX in general. I'd love to hear from anyone with experience in the EHR space about the role UX has played in what you've done in the past and what you're thinking about in the future.