Computers, Medicine, Usability, viewed from the ED
If you're new here, you might like to look through this introduction to the site first.
Are you interested in how computers can reduce medical error?
Did you know that many early medical computer systems increased medical error? (Some current ones, too.)
From your own experience with your own computer at home, do you think that some computers and programs crash on a regular basis? Do you think that most software is hard to use, rude, and frustrating to work with? Based on experience, what you’ve heard, or simple extrapolation, do you suspect that medical computer systems are even worse?
Did you know that the best place to test medical computer systems is the ED, because people working in the ED don’t have the time to deal with bad computer systems, and are intolerant of BS? (If it works in the ED, you can make it work anywhere else in the hospital.)
Do you want to learn more about how to make medical computer systems usable, so as to prevent medical error?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then read through the Medical Computing series. Although looked at from my viewpoint in the ED, it all applies to medical computer systems wherever they are used, in a hospital, in a clinic or in an office.
If you need a backgrounder on Healthcare IT concepts and terminology, see Healthcare IT in a Nutshell.
There’s also a series of “word” essays that focus on particular and generally more advanced medical computer issues.
To keep up with new postings, you might want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
One final note: Once explained, most of the suggestions on this site seem simple and obvious. But as one is creating a program, or even as one is using a program with a high level of frustration, they are still not obvious until pointed out.
I hope you find the site informative and, perhaps, a bit mind-expandingly entertaining.
Keith Conover, M.D., FACEP
Less is More
–Mies van der Rohe
In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, the most pithy: omit needless words.
In Cognitive Friction, we extended the idea to graphical computer user interfaces as “omit needless pixels.” In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we looked at Nielsen and Tahir’s analysis of the percentage of a home page’s area devoted to different purposes; in this way, we could determine which were valid data pixels, which were not, and the ratio of data to non-data pixels. Read the rest of this entry »
