By Tammy Coutts (MEDITECH), Vice Chair of the EHR Association User Experience Work Group, and Mike Shonty (MEDITECH), Member of the User Experience Work Group

In the first installment of this two-part blog series on disability inclusion, we discussed disability exclusion and why accessibility is important to EHRs. In this second blog, we look at the role of personas in supporting accessibility in EHRs.

Identifying ways health IT can be designed to support and advance disability inclusion across healthcare to the benefit of anyone requiring accommodation to fully and effectively participate in or navigate the healthcare system is an EHR Association priority. It is the focus of the Accessibility Personas Project, the latest initiative to come out of the Association’s User Experience Work Group. The project’s goal is to build awareness of the ways disability exclusion impacts health IT users – patients, providers, and other healthcare workers – and identify design solutions to eliminate the challenges. 

We seek to do this by expanding the Association’s Personas Library to include Accessibility Personas, as well as potentially creating workflow scenarios and other resources designed to highlight those scenarios and offer solutions. 

The Important Role of Personas

Personas help provide a clearer understanding of health IT users’ goals, problems, and backgrounds to help focus on what they’re trying to accomplish and how they’ll evaluate a solution or tool. They highlight pain points and conflicts, offer opportunities for innovation, and provide a way to summarize and communicate research. Personas are representations of real users and are designed to help organizations build empathy so they can develop solutions tailored to their needs.

Accessibility Personas focus on the digital aspects of health IT and the tools, features, and functionalities developers can introduce to make their products disability inclusive.

Accessibility Personas focus on the digital aspects of health IT and the tools, features, and functionalities developers can introduce to make their products disability inclusive. They help resolve the disability-related challenges that disrupt workflows and prevent users with disabilities from realizing maximum benefits – regardless of whether that disability is permanent such as low vision, hand tremors, or paralysis, or temporary like a sprained wrist or broken hand.  

Our goal with the Accessibility Personas Project is to build awareness, identify often-unseen problems, and bring forward a variety of solutions to ensure EHRs and other digital tools are useful and valuable additions to workflows and care delivery for all – regardless of whether or not they identify as having a disability.

Inclusion Benefits All

Given that more than 25% of us will have our accessibility to health IT limited by disability, everyone benefits when technology is designed with inclusivity in mind. We have seen that over time, as many accessibility solutions have become mainstream. Closed captioning, wheelchair ramps, and even the colors of scrubs and operating rooms are all related to improved accessibility, and they all now benefit even those who don’t identify as having a disability. 

By better understanding how different disabilities interfere with health IT usability, we can find solutions that will benefit patients, providers, healthcare workers, and the industry as a whole. 

Watch this space for updates from the Accessibility Persona Project as we continue our work on advancing disability inclusion in health IT. Meanwhile, if you have insights or exclusion examples you’d like to share or if you’d like to be part of the EHR Association User Experience Work Group Accessibility Persona Project, please reach out to us at staff@ehra.org.