By Emily Richmond and Tammy Coutts, Chair and Vice Chair, EHRA Clinician Experience Workgroup

Anyone who switches frequently between a Mac and a PC knows the pain of inconsistency. The OK and Cancel buttons are in different places, the menus are in different locations, and there are even differences in the way you close a screen or program. These inconsistencies, while seemingly trivial, can contribute to a user’s “cognitive load,” which is the thing that makes you feel fuzzy and slow when you’re navigating a screen that doesn’t fit your mental model.

As system designers, electronic health record (EHR) developers operate in the same way as the designers of other systems–they work closely with users to understand their needs and the context of their use, and they strive to create designs that are straightforward, simple to understand, and a joy to use. However, despite this shared dedication to delivering a high quality product, EHR products from different companies don’t always present solutions to those problems in the same way. The result could be that systems that were designed in isolation to reduce cognitive load might end up contributing to it when a user must use multiple platforms to complete their daily tasks.

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By Shari Medina, MD, and Janet Campbell

EHRA was recently invited by For The Record magazine to write a column focused on EHRs and patient safety.  Our collaboration, “Patient Safety is a Shared Responsibility,” has been published in the October issue, and we wanted to share a few excerpts here on the EHRA blog.

Obviously patient safety is at the core of what all of us in healthcare do—providers, payers, IT professionals, and software developers. While EHRs contribute to patient safety, patient safety is a shared responsibility, with each stakeholder playing a key role.

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With the accelerated adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is growing recognition of the benefits associated with the use of these technologies – reduced medical errors, faster access to complete information, more efficient communications among busy clinicians, and increasing patient engagement in their healthcare decisions. At the same time, there is a dialog taking place among all stakeholders on the issues related to busy clinicians taking advantage of data re-use capabilities to avoid re-entering identical information as they create their encounter documentation.

The EHR Association strongly believes that data re-use tools are critically important for clinicians, provide clear benefit for patients and, when used appropriately, enable accurate legal and financial recording workflows for providers.

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