ed-informatics.org

One important medical computer application (hereinafter “app”) is a PACS system. PACS stands for “Picture archiving and communication system.” (PACS system is redundant, but so be it.). Wikpedia has a nice explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_archiving_and_communication_system. For emergency physicians, it’s where we usually view X-rays and CT scans, and enter “wet reads” (our preliminary interpretations of X-rays, […]

User experience (“UX” to the cognoscenti) is a burgeoning field. Used to be we called this computer usability, user interface design or user interaction design. It was focused mostly on software such as word processors, spreadsheets, industrial control software, airplane cockpits, and medical applications. But, given how much money can be made on the web, […]

There is an electronic medical record program (EMR) called DocuTAP that I use at one of my jobs. It’s not bad overall, and it’s the top-rated Urgent Care Center EMR. But, as with every EMR, it can be improved. In many ways. I just ran across another new way in which it can be improved. […]

Let’s suppose it is 1980. Suppose someone shows up in your ED with a fever, and a history of travel to an area with a new plague characterized by fever. The nurse has heard about this on the news, asks the patient about travel to the area, and gets a “yes.” The nurse not only writes this on the paper […]

In Icons, Pedagogic Vectors, Forms Design and Posture we briefly discussed icon design. (Icons, in this context, meaning the sketch-pictures on buttons that you can click.) The bottom line was that it’s hard to learn and remember what icons stand for. In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we discussed how icons should be […]