What clinicians want: demystifying the clinical usability of Electronic Health Records

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) interface is the cornerstone tool through which clinicians review, interpret, create and curate patient data. Unlike paper records, which are created by clinicians for their own use, the defining challenge of the EHR interface is that they are built by non-clinicians. This disconnect causes the well-recognised but poorly understood pain point of poor clinical usability.

Clinicians are a marginalised group in the field of EHR interface design even though they are the primary users. Realigning the EHR with the core tenet of user-centredness means capturing 'how clinicians think'. Finding a way of communicating this clinician voice defines the purpose, scope and approach of this research.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an approach to enquiry which involves researchers and community members working together to (1) produce practical knowledge; (2) make that knowledge accessible through action and (3) effect transformation, both socially and for the individuals involved.

Led by myself (a doctor and design researcher), core methods running through this research are reflective prototyping, diffractive mixed methods evaluation, heuristic development and epistemic visualisation.

This will be the inaugural presentation of a world-first set of EHR clinical usability heuristics and a novel EHR interface prototype—designed through an epistemic approach to visualisation.

What you can expect to learn from this session:

1. A pioneering set of clinical usability heuristics
2. A novel epistemic EHR interface

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