Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

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> Focus on the doctor/nurse/patient user experience, make EHR software that does what every facebook/google+/linkedin, heck even blogger user takes for granted, get the adoption rates up, and kill these greedy as sons of bitches at their own game.

I agree 100% in principle, but I think that in reality this won't work. Why? Because the people that would benefit from that approach (focusing on the user experience, etc.) are not the people that make the decisions about which system to buy. Those people could care less about what it looks like, or how usable it is.

That's the reason why so many EHRs have UIs that look like they belong up on blocks in somebody's front yard, and even worse-looking APIs- a misalignment of interests between the users of the system and the people who make the purchasing decisions.

It's like a little microcosm of everything that's wrong with the entire medical system... :-)

Not always true; for any project we do which would impact patient care there is always at least a physician involved, sometimes a nurse as well. The reason our Epic UI looks they way it does is because clinicians want it that way.

We have tried to streamline the interface, but they don't want IT telling them what is important to put on the screen. During our last upgrade we had issues because some physicians put so much on the screen that caused a problem with the program; Epic implemented a fix for us, but the physician took something we showed them and ran with it. Then they started telling others who did the same.

The end result was like the image people like to link to whenever this topic comes up; a screen full of check boxes and sliders. They like this because all of the information they want is on one screen and they can quickly go down the screen making selections. When we tried to streamline this they didn't like that there would be multiple screens to load and then they wouldn't have one way to see everything selected without a summary page which was yet another screen.

I work in IT security and user experience is one of the key things we focus on; a system that is confusing or difficult to use will be used in ways we do not expect. Making the most obvious choice the right choice reduces risk, confusion and helps ensure people do the right thing.

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