Medigy Logo The Healthcare IT Guy
Person name
Managing Editor
@ShahidNShah

Usability

A collection of 19  Posts

Why is there a lack of sophisticated UX, usability, and UI discipline in the current design of safety-critical apps and devices?

A friend of mine, a User Interaction (UI)/User Experience (UX) designer and a usability expert that is doing some work at a technology-based medical device client, wrote to me wondering why many medical device companies don’t have much of a UX/UI and usability focused discipline in their marketing and product design teams. The simple reason is that many device manufacturers are still following top-down monolithic processes like waterfall instead of more agile processes that allow feedback-driven requirements definition.

Shahid N. Shah

Video: where I see health IT data today and where it’s probably going

The nice folks at Iron Mountain, a publicly traded storage and information management services company, reached out to me during the summer and asked what I think the challenges are around healthcare data management. They recorded my answers in a series of interviews published as part of National Health IT Week (Sep 16th-20th). Here’s the first of the series: Many of you probably already know Iron Mountain as a records management, data backup and recovery, document management, and secure shredding company because they’ve been doing that kind of work for years across many different industries.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Creating a Culture of Adoption for EHRs and Health IT

It is general knowledge among seasoned EHR implementers that EHR technology is not the primary concern when promoting EHR adoption (while there are many areas of potential improvements, the tech is generally “good enough” in most cases). There are, however, many challenges surrounding the deployments EHRs and one of the biggest is that not enough training or pre work done to prepare staff and resources. A great way to ensure EHR success is by creating a “Culture of Adoption,” which is something I discussed at length with my friend John Lynn after he attended a recent “think tank” style event hosted at TEDMED by the Breakaway Group (a Xerox Company).

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Achieving product simplicity in healthcare offerings is hard but possible

_I’m a geek and proud of it — I love building software, launching new products, and am a fan of others that do it well. Recently I ran across the Berlin-based team from kenHub, a site focused on teaching anatomy online and helping medical students prepare for tests. I reached out to the team to ask them how they were differentiating themselves from the many other solutions available they said their goal was to simplify the process of learning using new didactic concepts to focus on memorizing and gamification elements to make it fun and engaging.

Shahid N. Shah

Reducing Shadow IT in healthcare by embracing “good enough for HIPAA” business-friendly SaaS tools

I’ve said repeatedly that any cloud / SaaS vendor that wants to be taken seriously in healthcare must be willing to sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and I was happy to hear that Box.com is now willing to do so. I’m quite pleased that we’re finally seeing some serious healthcare SaaS offerings from horizontal (non-healthcare-specific) vendors. Only when we move beyond healthcare-specific offerings will we be able to unshackle ourselves from the decades old legacy health IT vendors and that’s great news.

Shahid N. Shah

How do you decide which features to add to your software?

Given the well-warranted focus on design these days it’s always difficult to find the right balance between features that we should add to our software and those that we leave out. I was running a class recently on how to build product roadmaps for health IT apps / medical device software and the question of how we should decide which features to add came up. Here’s are just a few of the facets I talked about during that lecture:

Shahid N. Shah

To make physicians more productive, focus on IT and tools for their supporting staff first

Productivity loss and workflow disruptions are commonplace as our industry gets on the Meaningful Use bandwagon and is starting to adopt EHR systems at a slightly more rapid pace than in previous years (things aren’t really as rosy as many think, but the pace is picking up). The reason we have productivity loss is that we focus changing the behaviors of our most expensive resources too early in our automation journeys – we go after doctors first.

Shahid N. Shah

Join me for my EHR usability webinar on November 30 at 1:00p

I met researchers from Macadamian, a global UI design and innovation studio that has been doing some great work in the health IT usability space, at the recent EHR Usability Symposium held at NIST a couple of months ago. I was immediately impressed by their work so when they asked me to work with them on presenting NIST’s new Usability Criteria for Health IT and EHR Software document, I welcomed the opportunity.

Shahid N. Shah
Prev Posts

Medigy Innovation Network

Connecting innovation decision makers to authoritative information, institutions, people and insights.

Medigy Logo

The latest News, Insights & Events

Medigy accurately delivers healthcare and technology information, news and insight from around the world.

The best products, services & solutions

Medigy surfaces the world's best crowdsourced health tech offerings with social interactions and peer reviews.

© 2025 Netspective Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Built on Mar 12, 2025 at 5:07am