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
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.
