News
Service to assess usability of EHR systems
22 April 2009
In response to the growing need for understanding the usability of
electronic healthcare records (EHRs), US company User Centric has
launched the first syndicated user performance research designed to
provide end-users with real data on the usability of EHR applications.
One of the key limiting factors to adoption now is usability. Up to
now the focus for comparing EHRs has been on functionality, and CCHIT's
expansive list of nearly 500 functions. Many of these functions do not
apply to many practices or specialties. CCHIT evaluations make no
comment on how "usable" these functions are across vendors. Neither
CCHIT nor the governmental bodies has taken the lead on ensuring that
the applications are usable by providers in the busy practice of
medicine.
"This is the opportunity for those vendors who claim to be 'user
friendly' or 'easy to use' to independently verify that claim against
other vendors," says Gavin Lew, Founder and Managing Director. "User
Centric's long history of expertise in user research and user interface
analysis and design, position us strongly to measure and improve the
customer experience with EHRs and EMRs."
There are many examples from industries outside of healthcare where
functionally equivalent, mission-critical applications are reliably
measured and compared.
User Centric is a global leader in large-scale user research studies,
having conducted more than 500 engagements with more than 10,000 hours
of face-to-face testing, and is thus well positioned to develop
standards and measures of user performance in health IT, and
specifically in EMR/EHR.
"User Centric is uniquely positioned to provide this service as we
are experts in human performance, and experts in user interface design,"
says Dr. Robert Schumacher, Managing Director.
"For the first time health care purchasers will get to the heart of
'meaningful use' — objective, independent data based on actual use. Our
research will not be based on a surveys or checklists. It is real
performance measurement gathered from practicing clinicians using
realistic data. Combined with CCHIT and KLAS data, healthcare purchasers
can have a complete picture of function, opinion, and now usability of
applications."
User Centric's syndicated research offering consists of employing
state-of-the-art user research methods to measure efficiency,
effectiveness, and satisfaction. Clinical users, representative of the
market, will perform tasks based on use cases drawn from ONCHIT.
Criterion-based measures of learnability and usability will be
collected.
Usability is highly correlated with adoption. Applications that are
more usable stand a higher chance of success in the marketplace.
The service is fee-based to offset costs, and all subscribing vendors
will receive an extensive report on the user performance of their
application. In the initial offering, the first ten subscribing vendors
will receive the report, and a readout as well as expert advice on how
to improve the customer experience with user interface. Healthcare
organizations can have access to the report in late 2nd quarter.
|