Usability of Health IT Tools

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | October 22, 2015

A recent article of mine celebrated a clever educational service offered on the Web by the US Department of Health and Human Services. I ended with a list of three lessons for the health care field regarding usability of health IT Tools, which deserve further explanation.

Andy OramCommunications can be improved by using the advanced features provided by the Web and mobile devices. In the HHS case, developers went to great lengths to provide a comfortable, pleasant experience to anyone who viewed their content, even if the viewers were visiting a different web site and the HHS content was merely embedded there.

This commitment to modern expectations is rare in the health care field. Web sites and electronic records are famously stuck in the 1990s. Doctors have been warned that they can’t use unencrypted email or text messages to communicate sensitive information to patients, so they use patient portals that are self-contained and hard to access. The tools on my family practice’s portal, provided by eClinicalWorks, don’t even come up to the standards of email systems developed in the 1980s. They lack such fundamental features as viewing messages by sender or viewing threads of multiple messages..