February 11, 2011 5:15 PM

Dr. Rob Schertzer is an opthalmologist in Vancouver and regular contributor to CanadianEMR. He is passionate about the use of technology to improve patient care and will be a guest blogger on CanadianEMR in the future.

I would like to highlight one of Dr. Schertzer's recent postings because of its relevance to usability and the challenges faced by physicians in terms of specialty functionality that makes the job of practicing medicine easier. He writes:

"I recently compulsively changed my Pioneer audio deck for one that could interface better with my iPhone. As technology evolves, a deck that handled my iPod could not interact with the newer iPhone. Unfortunately, I ignored the usability issues I had learned from the last car deck upgrade by focusing instead on the feature set. How often do we do the same when selecting an Electronic Medical Record system?

With my current EMR, the steps seem just as convoluted as using the MFC on my audio deck. While examining a patient, I need to check the findings from previous visits for a specific part of the exam. I see a scar on the cornea and inflammation in the anterior chamber on today’s visit. Did this patient have these findings on previous visits? I move the current visit’s exam form off to the side of my computer screen (or to a second monitor) then click on the EMR icon in the side panel, find the Virtual Chart tab, click on that, visually scan to see which line on the spreadsheet is from the prior visit, then double click to view. Basically the equivalent of pressing a button on the audio deck, rotating to the correct date, clicking the knob to view it, and risking clicking on the wrong entry. Scanning through that form, I can at last see the findings from the previous visit. What about other prior visits? Same thing, basically turning a knob to highlight the correct pre-set, then pressing the knob, in this case double-clicking, just to get what I was looking for."

Click here to read the full posting

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Posted by Sue Ansell at February 11, 2011 5:15 PM

Categories: eHealth

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