NIST partners with ONC, AHRQ to provide EHR usability guidance
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has partnered with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to publish new reports to guide software developers in improving EHR usability.
Usability has been a topic of considerable interest in the health IT community; one of the new reports provides NIST guidance about processes of user-centered design (UCD) for EHR application developers.
UCD serves to engineer improved usability and human performance into a system or device, according to the report. UCD models have the following principles:
Efforts to improve the usability of EHRs are widely recognized as key to achieving widespread adoption and meaningful use of these systems.
“The process of usability testing involves detailed planning, including a complete description of recruitment, moderator‘s guide, methods, tasks and measures,” concluded the report. “The measures typically collected include task success, task times, errors, subjective satisfaction and verbal report.”
The second report, from AHRQ, identifies gaps in the processes and practices used by EHR vendors to ensure the usability of their products. One key finding from the report highlighted the lack of standard approaches and formats for testing and reporting usability of EHR products across the industry.
To read the NIST report on improving EHR usability, click here.
Click here for the PDF file of the AHRQ report.
Usability has been a topic of considerable interest in the health IT community; one of the new reports provides NIST guidance about processes of user-centered design (UCD) for EHR application developers.
UCD serves to engineer improved usability and human performance into a system or device, according to the report. UCD models have the following principles:
- Understand user needs, workflows and work environments;
- Engage users early and often;
- Set user performance objectives;
- Design the user interface from known human behavior principles and familiar user interface models;
- Conduct usability tests to measure how well the interface meets user needs; and
- Adapt the design and iteratively test with users until performance objectives are met.
Efforts to improve the usability of EHRs are widely recognized as key to achieving widespread adoption and meaningful use of these systems.
“The process of usability testing involves detailed planning, including a complete description of recruitment, moderator‘s guide, methods, tasks and measures,” concluded the report. “The measures typically collected include task success, task times, errors, subjective satisfaction and verbal report.”
The second report, from AHRQ, identifies gaps in the processes and practices used by EHR vendors to ensure the usability of their products. One key finding from the report highlighted the lack of standard approaches and formats for testing and reporting usability of EHR products across the industry.
To read the NIST report on improving EHR usability, click here.
Click here for the PDF file of the AHRQ report.