Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

There’s been a lot of discussion on various blogs about the Cerner CPOE article (where there’s a claim about increased mortality rates because of it). Jakob took a stab at tackling medical software usability in Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design. It’s not terribly informative nor is there much new in there (the main information comes from a JAMA article), but at least it’s a start. I’m thinking about doing a usability study on existing medical and health IT software. Comment here if you’d like to see a report like that so I can gauge interest. Tim over at HIStalk also thought it might be a good idea to get a study going or standards established. Perhaps the folks at HIMMS need to take the leadership here?

By the way, the folks over at Human Factors MD do usability testing and design for medical/clinical software. I’ve never worked with them but I’ll try and interview them soon and report on their value.