ONC focusing on usability
Despite the gains in integrating IT into healthcare, there is room for improvement. That's the message of Jacob Reider, MD, acting national coordinator of health IT, in a post on the Health IT Buzz blog.
The usability challenges he faced as a practicing physician more than 10 years ago "remain unresolved," he wrote. "This is a problem."
While early adopters of technology are well known to tolerate imperfections, Reider pointed out that health IT differs from consumer electronics. The user isn’t always the buyer. Multi-year contracts and technical “lock-in” cause portability to be a true challenge. "Buying an EHR is more like buying an airplane than a clock radio." Legacy software in a high-risk environment will evolve slowly.
"We know that no software is perfect, and therefore no EHR is perfect. Like the airplane cockpit, the EHR is a complex instrument, to be used by highly trained professionals to perform complex tasks. Any errors in execution of these tasks could be deadly," Reider wrote.
The Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT has been working toward "more consistently incorporating usability into the bullet list of expectations" for health IT. That includes holding usability conferences, hosting hearings on EHR usability, commissioning the Institute of Medicine's report on health IT and patient safety and developing other resources.
Reider wrote that ONC is trying to understand the issues and "define an appropriate balance for the government’s role in helping evolve health IT toward better efficiency and safety through enhanced usability."
Read the full post.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.