I’ve worked in healthcare usability for a long time and with the impetus to move all of healthcare to electronic platforms, there have been many, many unusable implementations of EHRs and EMRs.
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) are working to provide guidelines for healthcare software usability.
Healthcare providers may soon have guides that describe the usability of electronic health records – designed to make the steps to adopt and use health IT clear and transparent and, in the process, improve patient safety.
Among the efforts, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a set of procedures that are objective and repeatable for evaluating, testing and validating the usability of electronic health records and other health IT systems, said Lana Lowry, NIST health IT usability project lead.
Usability guidelines and evaluation techniques in healthcare are sorely needed. Keep up to date on these efforts here: