THE PHYSICIAN’S ROLE
During the course of the project, SHARPC researchers developed a number of products and tools they be- lieve will help willing vendors build more usable EHRs. The SHARPC website and the Better EHR book de- tail the fruits of the group’s work. In part, researchers developed:
• A set of usability and safety-en- hanced design guidelines grouped into 14 categories, available at
https://sbmi.uth.edu/nccd/ehrus ability/design/guidelines;
• An e-book focusing on EHR medi- cation issues titled Inspired EHRs: Designing for Clinicians, available at
http://InspiredEHRs.org; and
• TwinList, a user interface to im- prove speed and accuracy in medi- cation reconciliation.
“In the future, I think there really
are no excuses anymore to suggest that EHRs should not be usable,” Dr.
Walji said. “I think we know how to make EHRs usable. It’s certainly not a trivial task. But there are processes in place, and there are ways to do this, techniques to do these things. And hopefully for the vendors, they will … take this up and move this whole thing forward.” But Dr. Singh cautions SHARPC
was merely a starting point. “SHARPC may have uncovered a few things that are important, but this is a long-term sort of endeavor, and we’re going to keep finding more stuff to fix. EHR use is a complex so- ciotechnical process, and usability extends beyond just interacting with a computer screen. I think the more we look, the more issues we’re going to uncover,” Dr. Singh said. Dr. Singh agrees with Dr. Walji’s assessment that physicians are part of the “shared responsibility” in build- ing better EHR systems. Dr. Singh, a patient safety researcher at the Mi- chael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs
Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine, helped develop the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resil- ience (SAFER) guides, which ONC released in early 2014 to help health care organizations identify and miti- gate EHR-related patient safety risks. (See “Playing It SAFER,” June 2014 Texas Medicine, pages 35–38, or www
.texmed.org/playingitsafer.) “We need to create better bridges
between the physician community, the vendor community, and the IT community in general so we can actu- ally have better participation in this process,” Dr. Singh said. “Physicians should adopt leadership roles related to the EHR, rather than just being the end users and get more empowered to say, ‘OK, this is what we need to do, and this is how we will do it.’”
Joey Berlin is a reporter for Texas Medicine. You can reach him by phone at (800) 880-1300, ext. 1393, or (512) 370-1393; by fax at (512) 370-1629; or by email at
joey.berlin@
texmed.org.
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IT ALL ADDS UP TOBIG WINS
September 2015 TEXAS MEDICINE 43
2015 SESSION
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