Technology BY JOEY BERLIN
“Better bridges,” better systems
PHYSICIANS NEED TO GET INVOLVED IN USABILITY TESTING TO HELP VENDORS IMPROVE EHRS
I
f electronic health records (EHRs) are going to be more usable — and less frustrating — than physicians find them today, a multiyear research proj- ect at The University of Texas found EHR vendors will need to shore up
their development processes. But the future of improving EHR usability doesn’t just sit at the feet of the
vendors, researchers found; they’ll need help from other stakeholders. That in- cludes physicians, who need to be involved in EHR development before they become the perplexed end users who gnash their teeth and smack their moni- tors every time an EHR doesn’t cooperate. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) led
a four-plus-year effort to study EHRs’ usability and workflow and propose bet- ter ways of designing EHR systems. An Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) grant funded the project, a product of the UT School of Biomedical Informatics’ National Center for Cognitive Infor- matics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD). The project wrapped up last November, and researchers chronicled the re-
sults of their work in a book titled Better EHR: Usability, Workflow and Cognitive Support in Electronic Health Records and online at
www.sharpc.org. Some of the research centered on testing EHR systems for usability and in- terviewing EHR vendors about their capabilities to build systems tailored to the needs of the user. The usability testing of commercial EHRs largely confirmed what many physicians report from their own experience: EHR systems are often difficult to use and hinder patient care in a clinical setting. “What we learned was that it’s not only the vendors’ fault in terms of why
these EHRs are not usable,” said Muhammad Walji, PhD, associate dean for technology services and informatics at the UTHealth School of Dentistry and a primary researcher on the project. “It’s kind of a shared responsibility that we have — the vendors, the researchers like us, as well as the people who are us- ing it. And if we can all work together, we may be able to come up with better products.”
THE GRANT In 2010, ONC provided $15 million over four years to fund a group of four Stra- tegic Health Information Technology Advanced Research Projects, including a study of patient-centered cognitive support, known as SHARPC. The SHARPC project’s primary goal was to address usability, workflow, and cognitive support problems with EHRs. The EHR usability and workflow component was one of several subprojects.
September 2015 TEXAS MEDICINE 39 “Poor
usability is a critical challenge limiting the
adoption and safe use of EHRs.”
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