Usability Across Health Information Technology Systems: Searching for Commonalities and Consistency

Abstract

Usability of health information technology (HIT) remains a predominant concern - one often exacerbated by clinicians' need to access information created by many different professionals in different settings, often using very dissimilar EHRs or even different configurations of the same EHR. Because of these variations, we argue that we must no longer think of usability as anchored in one setting, one EHR, one data standard, or one type of clinician. Rather, usability must be understood as a collective and constantly evolving process. This paper seeks to address that reality by 1) substantially expanding our previously-developed conceptual matrix of the wide range of settings and interfaces comprising modern HIT and 2) presenting actual examples of EHR usability issues with similar data but very different displays or processes.

Keywords: Ergonomics; evaluation studies; patient safety.