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 Pennsylvania Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) held an international symposium on ED computer systems, November 12-15 in Miami. This was the fifteenth year for the conference. The focus was on how to effectively and efficiently use computer technology for ED process improvement. There were attendees from the 6000-bed Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taipei, and from the UK. Reviews from the attendees and from the vendors seemed quite positive. In 2009, there was no conference due to the worldwide recession. The 2010 conference’s attendance was below projections. There are various theories as to why this was so: the continued economic slump, the transition in many hospitals to being forced to use the ED module of an enterprise system rather than a niche system, and others. Regardless, PaACEP has determined not to offer this conference in the future.
This entry was posted by kconover on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at
7:47 pm and is filed under
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