EHR usability is an often-cited concern among clinicians, and it is one concern MEDITECH is trying to address with its new mobile, web-based EHR.
During an online demonstration of the EHR, Helen Waters, MEDITECH's vice president of sales and marketing, said the EHR vendor sought to develop a solution that functions with the ease and intuition of other devices clinicians use everyday.
"As pressures clearly have mounted in the industry [to] improve patient outcomes and do so at a lower cost, the physician productivity factor is more important than ever," Ms. Waters said. "To achieve enhanced clinical productivity, physicians in particularly really need a kind of user interface that's intuitive, whichthey've come to expect from the proliferation of consumer devices and applications that they use in every other aspect of their life."
Intuition appears to be the operative word here, as MEDITECH's EHR functions on any mobile device, and it functions like applications on those mobile devices. Users can drag and drop information and swipe through screens to navigate instead of having to click and scroll through data. The EHR is meant to have a consumer app feel. With this familiar navigation system, Ms. Waters said the amount of time spent learning to use the new system can be cut down from hours to just minutes.
Dan Symes, MEDITECH's senior supervisor marketing support, echoed Ms. Waters' sentiment. "It's based on current web navigation that's employed in all of the web products we see on a daily basis," he said. "Providers don't have a learning curve to overcome when utilizing the solution."
Additionally, the EHR is device- and provider-agnostic, so users can access it from devices with which they are already comfortable.
While the EHR comes with standard content, like order sets and documentation templates, the system is customizable, so clinicians can select what information they see, when and where they want to see it.
MEDITECH is seeking to raise the EHR bar with this product and solve the usability issue once and for all.
"The new user interface should be doing for the EHR space what Apple historically did for the digitalization of music and the proliferation of change in the cell phone business by making personal, digital assistance an adjunct to people's lives in a very simple, easy, intuitive format," Ms. Waters said.
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