Four Takeaways from EHRA’s Health IT Usability Summit

On June 21, the Electronic Health Records Association held its second annual Shaping Usability of Health IT Summit. The event brought together more than 70 individuals, including physicians, EHR developers and even ONC Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Technology Reform John Fleming. Mandy Long, chair of the EHRA Clinician Experience Workgroup and vice president of corporate operations at Modernizing Medicine, co-hosted the summit. In a recent phone interview, Long outlined a few key highlights of the event.

Design Patterns for Safety

One of the main purposes of the summit was for EHRA to unveil Design Patterns for Safety, an undertaking launched as a result of the association’s first usability event in December 2015.

Personas Project

EHRA also launched its Personas Project at the summit. Attendees assisted in creating a repository of industry personas, or representations of core user groups. Each persona included the group’s goals, needs and interests. After hours of work, the attendees came up with drafts of 10 EHR user personas, such primary care physician, IT technician and patient. All total, EHRA collected more than 50 pages of notes for the project, Long said... The repository of notes gathered at the summit will be a reference for future drafts of Design Patterns for Safety...