Usability Evaluation Handbook For Electronic Health Records

Usability is the key to the meaningful use of EHRs, resulting in safe, easy-to-use, and useful applications. Good usability saves money by reducing the time and resources needed for training and post-implementation support, lessens the negative impacts on productivity, and diminishes technology-induced errors. It also promotes user satisfaction and adoption. Written by two health informaticists with different professional backgrounds, one from nursing and the other from IT, this book is intended for organizations that purchase and customize EHRs, and also for EHR vendors and programmers. The book provides the tools, ideas, and knowledge that will help readers improve EHRs. Chapters cover key definitions of usability, electronic health records, and users; commonly accepted principles of usability; usability evaluation through testing and research; usability related to workflow; usability evaluation methods, including instructions, tools and tips for each method; and building a business case for usability. The book also discusses the future of usability, and the need for optimizing EHR usability today.

Governments and clinical providers are investing billions of dollars in health information technologies. This is being done with the expectation that HIT adoption will translate into healthier patients experiencing better care at lower cost. As the first wave of adoption comes to an end, stakeholders are ready to evaluate the results of their investment and make decisions about future directions. As a result, structured evaluations of a projects impact are an essential element of the justification for investment in HIT. This book provides an easy-to-read reference outlining the basic concepts, theory, and methods required to perform a systematic evaluation of HIT.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) offer great potential to increase healthcare efficiency, improve patient safety, and reduce health costs. The adoption of EHRs among office-based physicians in the US has increased from 20% ten years ago to over 80% in 2014. Among acute care hospitals in US, the adoption rate today is approaching 100%. Finding relevant patient information in electronic health records' (EHRs) large datasets is difficult, especially when organized only by data type and time. Automated clinical summarization creates condition-specific displays, promising improved clinician efficiency. However, automated summarization requires new kinds of clinical knowledge (e.g., problem-medication relationships).

Whether it's software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants - no, expects - your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You'll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product's usability, and more.

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Governments and clinical providers are investing billions of dollars in health information technologies (HIT). This is being done with the expectation that HIT adoption will translate into healthier patients experiencing better care at lower cost. In the initial push to roll out HIT, the reliability of these claims was often not substantiated by systematic evaluation and testing. As the first wave of widespread adoption of HIT comes to an end and the next wave begins, it is more important than ever that stakeholders evaluate the results of their investment, evaluate their success (or failure), and make decisions about future directions. Structured evaluations of a project’s impact are an essential element of the justification for investment in HIT. A systematic approach to evaluation and testing should allow for comparison between different HIT interventions with the goal of identifying and promoting those which improve clinical care or other outcomes of interest. The question of the day is no longer "why perform evaluations," but "how to perform evaluations." This updated book provides an easy-to-read reference outlining the basic concepts, theory, and methods required to perform a systematic evaluation of HIT. Chapters cover key domains of HIT evaluation: study structure and design, measurement fundamentals, results analysis, communicating results, guidelines development, and reference standards. Updated case studies and examples are included demonstrating the successes or failures of these investments. The authors also include new initiatives put in place by the government and discuss how they are being adopted and used by health systems.