For some reason, everyone seems to like dashboards. Maybe it is because a lot of us can think better visually than we can with just text.

To help visual thinkers, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs found an interesting way to publish the data about the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology.

The information displayed in their visual dashboard is derived from data published by CMS.

CureMD announced today its plans to create a new technology paradigm in the Oncology field by offering medical oncologists and their staffs an affordable Cloud Based solution to automate all clinical, administrative, and financial aspects of their busy practices.

Researchers from Stanford University Department of Biomedical Informatics and Harvard Medical School examined the case of a two-year-old boy who died after clinical staff overrode EHR alerts about potential drug allergy cross-reactivity. Prior to inappropriately administering a diuretic to the patient, the clinical staff overrode more than 100 alerts over the course of one month.

This lawsuit alleges Allscripts “misled its physician customers about the quality and functionality of MyWay” electronic health record (EHR) software which was sold to approximately 5,000 physicians across the nation from 2009 until Allscripts withdrew it from the market at the end of 2012. The cost of the software, according to the law firm’s website was “approximately $40,000 per physician to implement.”

The attorneys created this website to provide information about the suit: http://allscriptsmywayclassaction.com/

What a great headline! In an article published by Venture Beat, they describe how nurses are truly the head cornerstone to EHR adoption.

We provide usability testing services for the ONC 2015 Edition Certification for Safety-enhanced Design

They should be also looking for usability help, not outside engineering-centric developers!

EHR vendors: Contact Us!

Electronic health record (EHR) companies are beginning to partner with outside software developers to help them ramp up new applications for care management, population health management and patient engagement. Athenahealth, Allscripts, and eClinicalWorks (eCW) all are placing big bets on this approach, although eCW is tilting more toward mobile health apps than the other two vendors are.

Improved efficiency was one promise that proponents of electronic health record systems often touted to physicians to persuade them to adopt the systems. But many doctors have found the only way they can accomplish certain tasks in a reasonable amount of time is to do them on paper.

Medical News reported the results of a report from the American College of Physicians indicating “satisfaction and usability ratings for certified electronic health records (EHRs) have decreased since 2010 among clinicians across a range of indicators.” The announcement was made at the 2013 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference & Exhibition. According to Michael S.

Satisfaction and usability ratings for certified electronic health record systems have decreased since 2010, according to a report from the American College of Physicians and AmericanEHR Partners, Medical News Today reports. The report was released this week at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference.
The report is based on 4,279 responses to multiple surveys of clinicians conducted between March 2010 and December 2012 (Medical News Today, 3/7).

Report Findings

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a framework to think about the use of EHRs in relation to adverse events and patient safety. Lana Lowry, NIST project lead on usability and human factors for health IT, believes that in addition to a set of technical requirements for functionality, systems need to have the same set of user requirements for how a user performs with the system.

An American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Task Force on Usability made 10 recommendations to improve safety and quality by enhancing the usability of electronic health records. These recommendations were recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The AMIA task force examined the literature and vendor experiences with EHR design and implementation and made the recommendations across four major areas: human factors health information technology research, health IT policy, industry and the clinician end-user of EHR software.

The use of Healthcare Information Technology/Systems continues to grow and affect patient care and patient safety. In efforts to support a safe environment, the FDA's MedSun program is exploring problems related to Healthcare Information Technology/Systems that may affect patient safety.These problems may be detected within the hospital environment by IT/IS professionals, end-users, super-users, management or others.

Usability is "the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use" [ISO9241]. Usability represents an important yet often overlooked factor impacting the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. Without usable systems, doctors, medical technicians, nurses, administrative staff, consumers, and other users cannot gain the potential benefits of features and functions of EHR systems.

We've been working on creating set of best practices for mobile healthcare solutions during the past few months, and it has made us think about the evolution of user experiences and their underlying technology.

In 2004 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was created to promote health IT adoption and lay the foundation for an infrastructure that would grow with the changing landscape of healthcare and digital records. From the beginning the most basic of terms needed to be defined and adopted to create a consistent language that would support the whole system including public policies, private development, and outreach and educational initiatives.