ed-informatics.org

On occasion, an academic paper is published, but one of the following Letters to the Editor or editorial is much more important, with a longer-lasting influence than the original article. An example is an editorial about sore throats/tonsillitis by Dr. Centor, of Centor Criteria fame. Well, now we have similar situation in the field of […]

Less is More —Mies van der Rohe In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, […]

One of the supposed means to the great gains of electronic health records is that of the Personal Health Record (PHR). Big guns like Microsoft and Google dived into the PHR pool a few years ago (Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health), only to find that the water was quite shallow. Getting information into a Personal […]

Icons and Pedagogic Vectors We all have trouble remembering a program’s graphical icons. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has a standard for icons – an icon must be interpreted correctly by 2/3 of  test subjects. In usability and error-prevention terms, a 1/3 error rate is poor, but reality is even worse – an experimental study […]

A good principle for medical software is to design for the ED as a worst-case scenario. If it works there, it will work anywhere.No clinicians are as time-pressured as those in a busy Emergency Department. There, distractions – even seemingly minor ones like presenting a complete CBC instead of an abstract – slow the clinician […]