- Brittleness
- Robustness
- Diversity
- “Niche” Computer Systems
- Downtime
- Meaningful Use
- Efficiency
- Anticryptography
- Color
- RHIO
- “Wrong Patient”
- Cognitive Friction
- Dialog-Box Rooms
- Ignore
- What’s in a word?
- ALLCAPS
- Layers
- Consistency
- Menu
- Cost Disease
- RAND
- PHR
- Model T
- Giveaway
- Skeuomorphism
- Icon
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio
- Anti-Data Pixels
- iPhones
- Suicide
- Anthropology
- Wireframes
- Fitts’s Law
- Kludge
- Ebola
- Pop-Up
- Clicks
- Bad Apple
- Testing
- Bold
- Point-and-Click
- Anti-User Pixels
- Flat
- Glucose
An article in the New York Times points up some of the shortcomings of the push for meaningful use of electronic medical records (EMR): it’s vulnerable to fraud. The Department of Health and Human Services is shocked, just shocked, that perhaps some physicians and hospitals may have not been entirely accurate in self-reporting how well they’ve converted to an EMR, just to get a few million dollars.
But the part of the article that got my attention was this quote from Lynne Thomas Gordon, the chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association, a trade group in Chicago:
We’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we don’t know the rules of the road. Now we’ve had a big car pileup.
The reason I love this aphorism is not because I am shocked at the poor HHS oversight of the meaningful use process. To that, I say “duh.”
But it encapsulates where I think we are in terms of usability of medical software. Even our best software and hardware – iPhones and Android phones, Google search, Google Maps, and the like – are still barely beyond the Model T phase. Our medical software, far behind these market leaders, doesn’t even make it to the Model T level. Maybe its to the “pileup of Model Ts” phase.
We don’t need Model Ts, we need something like the Tesla Roadster.
Tags: electronic medical record, Computers, Information Technology, Healthcare, IT, Healthcare IT, Usability, User Interaction Design, User Interface
