Healthcare Software

EMR Usability Testing for Vendor selection?

A highlight for me at HIMSS10 yesterday was the education session "ARRA and EMR Usability: What Providers Need to Know".

As our own usability group has been saying in past posts ("Implementing an Effective EMR" and "UI Innovations in Self-Care"), interoperability, quality metrics and the other challenges that EMR software faces today are only part of the problem. 

Usability needs to be a top criterion in selecting an EMR, or you risk high training and re-training costs, frustration and resistance to adopt the system, alert fatigue rendering critical decision support useless, etc.

Presenters Jeff Belden (of TooManyClicks fame) and Janey Barnes first recaped the principles of effective usability that they presented in their whitepaper last year:

1. Simplicity - show me only what I need when I need it
2. Naturalness - each feature should work "like the world does"  (e.g. physician chart simulations, WebMD allowing the user to click on a part of the body)
3. Consistency
4. Minimizing Cognitive Load - the "don't make me think" principle (e.g. rather than showing me a patient's date of birth, calculate and display his age for me)
5. Efficient Interactions - avoid confusing navigation, use dashboards for example
6. Forgiveness and Feedback - show meaningful progress bars or other indicators, and allow user to recover gracefully from mistakes
7. Effective Information Presentation
8. Preservation of Context 

The real interesting part for me however was the methodology and criteria presented for evaluating and selecting an EMR for your clinical setting:

• Don't just watch the demo, ask for a free trial and use the EMR software yourself
• Don't be wow'ed by pre-populated templates, try out the template builder for yourself
• Try the Reporting function - too often the usability is overlooked in this feature, with all emphasis placed on main screen and methods for entering data
• Investigate blogs, reviews, word of mouth regarding the EMR software and its usability
• Define a series of scenarios and tasks that your staff needs to perform, then ask staff members to try those scenarios on the software and observe the results  (essentially, do your own usability testing).