By Mandy Long, Chair of the EHRA Clinician Experience Workgroup, and Vice President of Corporate Operations at Modernizing Medicine

On June 21, 2017, I had the pleasure of co-hosting EHRA’s Shaping Usability of Health IT Summit in Washington, DC. We had an impressive turnout, with over 70 attendees from across the health technology spectrum – from ONC’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Technology Reform Dr. John Fleming and other government officials, to physicians and nurses, to user-centered design experts, to EHR developers.

The engaging conversations highlighted the passion of those in attendance and addressed some of the most challenging issues facing the industry today. Facilitated discussions with influential stakeholders in a cross-functional forum to achieve specific usability-related goals was a novel approach for this type of gathering and good first step to problem-solving.

Across the health IT continuum, we see executives and frontline clinicians experiencing real joys, as well as real frustrations, in using technology in their daily working lives. On an almost daily basis, we all engage to create solutions for the challenges that we face as an industry. You know the buzz words – terms like “physician burnout” and “administrative burden.” As technology leaders, we spend a lot of time speaking to our end-users about what it takes to continually improve and move forward.  Usability is at the forefront of our discussions.

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