ed-informatics.org

Where is the Chart!?!? If you visit different EDs, one of the most common tracking-type refrains you hear is “Where is Room 5’s chart? I’ve been looking for it for fifteen minutes!” Such problems delay ED patient care, and are one of the great motivators for moving to an all-electronic chart, one that can be […]

One feature of most tracking systems is data display for an individual patient in the Emergency Department. In most tracking systems, we can double-click on the patient’s name, and then we see a pop-up window, populated with things that the nurses have entered and that are found in the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) entry: […]

If the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the Industrial Designer has failed. –Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955 Mental Models In the first edition of About Face, one of the first design/usability texts (and a great read, much more personal, personable and readable than subsequent, […]

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 […]