Videos of EHR Usability Suggestions

One of my readers sent me a link to a new site they’re developing called SaveTimeMD. This website was created as a response by an internist and EHR developer that was tired of seeing so many EHR usability problems. He decided that he’d take usability problems from users and make videos explaining how he’d resolve the EHR usability issue.

I think the concept is quite interesting. Many might ask why he doesn’t just build the perfect EHR if he’s so good at solving the usability problems. That’s the way my entrepreneurial mind would work. However, some people don’t approach problems with that entrepreneurial mindset. I’m not sure this doctor’s motivation, but I think the concept is quite interesting.

Here’s one of the videos he’s created that talks about intuitively navigating an EHR:

What do you think of the video? More importantly, what do you think of the idea of someone offering answers to your EHR usability challenges which you could take back to your EHR vendor?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

5 Comments

  • The fact that he’s doing this in MS Access, and expecting the user to memorize 8000 shortcut keystrokes that conflict with common OS keystrokes like one would find in a word processing or spreadsheet app tells me the motivation behind these videos has nothing to do with usability

  • I completely agree with Nik – although the mouseclick menu is up top on this prototype – to have to relay on memorization of keyboard shortcuts seems like a throwback. Get a laptop with a built in mouse – that would also get to the desired outcome of less hand movement from keyboard to external mouse.

  • Nik,
    I think it’s what he knows and it’s easy to rapidly prototype something to demonstrate.

    I agree that his description does focus on memorizing too many shortcut keystrokes. However, if done right it can be really efficient. Remember how quick it was to navigate those Unix/Dos screens that were all key strokes. Once someone got good it was extremely fast. There was a learning curve though. I think we’ve gone too far the other way where we don’t use any key strokes. Balance is probably the best of both worlds.

  • what about mobile, what about touch, what about voice? these all are critically important today and not mentioned in an article about ehr usability!

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