Usability and Provider Burden
Electronic health record (EHR) adoption is now approaching 100% in many health care settings. With this digital foundation in place, our focus shifts to improving EHR usability to ensure security, reliability, and, ultimately, patient safety.
Advancing Usability
Usability is among the most difficult characteristics of software to measure, making an objective assessment of a product’s usability difficult; however, the importance of improving EHR user experience is seen as a critical goal. Therefore, certain regulatory measures have been adopted as a way of promoting usability in health IT software products.
SAFER Guides
ASTP/ONC’s SAFER Guides are a valuable resource for healthcare providers, EHR users, developers, and others responsible for patient safety. The guides help organizations identify potential safety risks associated with their EHR systems, and also provide self-assessment tools to evaluate their EHR safety and use best practices to mitigate those risks.
2015 Edition Certification
The 2015 Edition Certification requires safety-enhanced design, which requires developers of certified health IT products to adopt user-centered design processes.
21st Century Cures Act
The 21st Century Cures Act prioritizes certain aspects of health IT by requiring transparent reporting on usability, security, and functionality (Sec. 4002).
Resources
ASTP/ONC, the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), and other public and private organizations are focusing on developing resources for health IT vendors and users to optimize the user experience.
- NIST health IT usability initiative is focused on establishing a framework that defines and assesses health IT usability.
- The usability.gov website is a resource for user experience best practices and guidelines.
- ASTP/ONC funded the SHARP-C project [PDF – 142 KB], which produced the Inspired EHRs book.
