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
The Cost Disease is both the name of a book, and the economic theory espoused by this book.
The theory is relatively simple at its base. There are two segments to our modern economy, the progressive and the stagnant.
The progressive sector makes rapid improvement in efficiency. Examples include manufacture, particularly of items such as computers and cellphones.
The stagnant sector, including healthcare, education and live entertainment, due to dependence on human-human interaction, does not improve its efficiency rapidly.
Thus, the fraction of our GNP (and your paycheck) spent on the stagnant sector will increase. Continously.
Note that I said the fraction.
This may seem depressing. But the authors point out that, in real terms, our society, globally, is becoming richer. Therefore, despite the increasing fraction we will spend on the stagnant sector, we will be able to afford it. We will be able to afford more and better healthcare, education, and live entertainment.
Nonetheless, we need to do what we can to make the stagnant sectors more progressive. They give examples in the book of how healthcare, in particular, can become more progressive.
It is apparent that there will be an excellent ROI in healthcare by maximizing the efficiency of our healthcare personnel. Some big projects like RHIOs will contribute to this, but at a massive cost. But think – how much of our healthcare personnel’s time is spent using – or cursing at – computers? Given the sad state of usability of our medical software, we will get a lot better ROI by simply making simple changes to our software to make it more usable. The cost of these changes is small compared to a RHIO, but the incremental benefit is huge. Thus, this website.
This entry was posted by kconover on Sunday, December 16th, 2012 at
8:17 pm and is filed under
Tutorials .
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