Software Design That is Intuitive Versus Prohibitive

I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but I need to take a minute to talk about some glitchy things that as a physician technologist, really make me crazy. Since I work at several different hospitals as a hospitalist, we can avoid naming names. 

At one facility, there are multiple IT-related problems that are not being addressed despite several physicians complaining about how they materially interfere with delivering care to hospitalized patients. There are software products that have been adopted to seemingly enhance the life of our hospital medicine team, but they don’t seem to work properly. 

Consider the speech-to-text dictation system that doesn’t open with ease, requires a new download every time I try to use it, files the dictations in the wrong place, and best yet, puts the words in the wrong order! 

Then there is the EHR – it also doesn’t always open so that means a system reboot to make it work. Once in, there are poorly designed templates for creating notes that make you answer the same questions for every note, despite the questions not applying to the particular patient. And standing order sets you can use for a patient that trigger pharmacy warnings that you have to click through every time you use them. 

There’s more, but you get the point. 

This all destroys the providers’ productivity and morale. There is very little that is more frustrating than having a lot of work to do, and technology getting in your way instead of making your life easier. 

This is why our focus at medaptus is to remove administrative hassles, and let the providers do their work. As Chief Medical Officer here, it’s my job to make sure that our software meets the needs of our end-users without putting up roadblocks (and it’s why we’ve won “Best in KLAS” ten times since 2011). However, beyond choosing the right vendors for software solutions, it’s equally critical for provider entities to have IT supports that are responsive to the needs of its front line staff, and willing to actively engage in improving their workflows.