DESIGNING A PHYSICIAN-FRIENDLY INTERFACE FOR AN ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEM

Donald Craig, Gerard Farrell

2010

Abstract

An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system enables a physician to record patients' health information, request reports from third partly health care providers and retrieve these reports when they are ready. Despite the numerous benefits of EMRs, several factors have inhibited their widespread adoption. An underappreciated but critical factor has been the proliferation of inferior user interfaces which are confusing to navigate and disruptive to a physician's workflow. To be useful, an EMR must allow physicians to record and query information in a natural manner that accommodates the non-linear nature of their workflow. In particular, an interface must permit a physician to record the minutiae of a patient's condition while at the same time preserving the physician's overview of a patient's record so that any aspect of the patient's health can be effortlessly queried and inspected. This paper proposes an interface design that attempts to address several of the usability deficiencies associated with current electronic medical record systems in use today.

References

  1. Ash, J. S., Berg, M., and Coiera, E. (2004). Some Unintended Consequences of Information Technology in Health Care: The Nature of Patient Care Information System-related Errors. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 11(2):104-112.
  2. Baron, R. J., Fabens, E. L., Schiffman, M., and Wolf, E. (2005). Electronic health records: Just around the corner? Or over the cliff? Annals of Internal Medicine, 143(3):222-226.
  3. Belden, J. L., Grayson, R., and Barnes, J. (2009). Defining and testing EMR usability: Principles and proposed methods of EMR usability evaluation and rating. HIMSS EHR Usability Task Force.
  4. Bui, A., Aberle, D., and Kangarloo, H. (2007). Timeline: Visualizing integrated patient records. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 11(4):462-473.
  5. Carter, J. H., editor (2008). Electronic Health Records, second edition. American College of Physicians, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  6. Cimino, J. J. and Shortliffe, E. H., editors (2006). Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine, third edition, chapter 2, pages 46-79. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, USA.
  7. Grossman, J. M., Gerland, A., Reed, M. C., and Fahlman, C. (2007). Physicians' experiences using commercial e-prescribing systems. Health Affairs, 26(3):w393- 404.
  8. Jagannathan, V., Mullett, C. J., Arbogast, J. G., Halbritter, K. A., Yellapragada, D., Regulapati, S., and Bandaru, P. (2009). Assessment of commercial NLP engines for medication information extraction from dictated clinical notes. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 78(4):284-291.
  9. Jha, A. K., DesRoches, C. M., Campbell, E. G., Donelan, K., Rao, S. R., Ferris, T. G., Shields, A., Rosenbaum, S., and Blumenthal, D. (2009). Use of electronic health records in U.S. hospitals. New England Journal of Medicine, 360(16):1628-1638.
  10. Miller, R. H. and Sim, I. (2004). Physicians' use of electronic medical records: Barriers and solutions. Health Affairs, 23(2):116-126.
  11. Reuss, E., Naef, R., Keller, R., and Norrie, M. C. (2007). Physicians' and nurses' documenting practices and implications for electronic patient record design. In Holzinger, A., editor, HCI and Usability for Medicine and Health Care, volume 4799 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 113-118. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
  12. Rose, A. F., Schnipper, J. L., Park, E. R., Poon, E. G., Li, Q., and Middleton, B. (2005). Using qualitative studies to improve the usability of an EMR. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 38(1):51-60.
  13. Thompson, S. M. and Dean, M. D. (2009). Advancing information technology in health care. Communications of the ACM, 52(6):118-121.
  14. Walsh, S. H. (2004). The clinician's perspective on electronic health records and how they can affect patient care. British Medical Journal, 328(7449):1184-1187.
  15. Zheng, K., Padman, R., Johnson, M. P., and Diamond, H. S. (2009). An interface-driven analysis of user interactions with an electronic health records system. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16(2):228-237.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Craig D. and Farrell G. (2010). DESIGNING A PHYSICIAN-FRIENDLY INTERFACE FOR AN ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEM . In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2010) ISBN 978-989-674-016-0, pages 324-329. DOI: 10.5220/0002746003240329


in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf10,
author={Donald Craig and Gerard Farrell},
title={DESIGNING A PHYSICIAN-FRIENDLY INTERFACE FOR AN ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEM},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2010)},
year={2010},
pages={324-329},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002746003240329},
isbn={978-989-674-016-0},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2010)
TI - DESIGNING A PHYSICIAN-FRIENDLY INTERFACE FOR AN ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEM
SN - 978-989-674-016-0
AU - Craig D.
AU - Farrell G.
PY - 2010
SP - 324
EP - 329
DO - 10.5220/0002746003240329