Users of EHRs Seek Standardization

It's time to consider standardizing electronic health records so that different vendors' EHRs are as similar and as easy to use as are cars that roll off the assembly lines of different automakers, a health IT advisory group suggests.

Variances in vendors' electronic health records frequently make it difficult for physicians who are accustomed to their practice's EHRs to easily use a hospital's EHR, two members of the Health IT Policy Committee's adoption and certification workgroup wrote in a letter to Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health IT.

The letter suggests launching "a few high-value use cases" to test usability, according to an online report in InformationWeek Healthcare. The report, written by Anthony Guerra, the founder of healthsystemCIO.com, cites a letter written last week by Marc Probst, chief information officer of Intermountain Healthcare, and Larry Wolf, senior consulting application/data architect at Kindred Healthcare. The recommendations came after a day-long hearing held by the workgroup.

"A repeated analogy we heard in the hearing is that of the automobile: steering wheel, directional signals, accelerator, and brake pedals have a high degree of consistency from vehicle to vehicle. Other aspects of the vehicle's controls and indicator dials vary somewhat but not all that much. Similarly, road signage is consistent for stop signs, informational, and warning signs," Probst and Wolf wrote, according to Guerra's report.

The workgroup members argued for better managing the "cognitive load" of navigating the systems, Guerra reports. "For example," he writes in paraphrasing the letter, "are related bits of data accessible on the same screen or must users go to different sections to find all the information they need at any one time?"

He says the letter ends with a suggestion for developing use cases to "provide the context for measuring usability, allowing usability testing and process improvement to proceed."