NURS 8210 Week 6 HIT Usability and Design Challenges

By Day 3 post a cohesive response to the following:

Place yourself in the role of the clinical administrator tasked with implementing the case study’s new health information technology system.
- Evaluate the usability challenges that you faced during implementation as well as the factors that caused these challenges.
- Determine whether these challenges were a result of implementation or design.
- Formulate strategies for overcoming these usability challenges.

Read a selection of your colleagues’ postings.

The development of HIT has brought with it several problems the IT has to deal with daily. An organization needs to put together the right team for a HIT system implementation to be successful. Health information systems (HIS) can present unique requirements that can be somewhat problematic during implementation. It is almost inevitable that a system would require constant design and redesign in problem areas during its lifetime (Schlotzer & Madsen, 2010).

The usability of EHR remains a priority and has emerged as an informatics topic of national interest. After years of development of IT in healthcare, clinicians have finally concluded that it does not provide the kind of cognitive and workflow support they need (Staggers, N. (2010). One of the main problems is accessing information created by many professionals using different settings that may not interact. Usability is supposed to bridge the gap between people and machines, thus promising to assist in completing tasks within shorter times with minimum effort. In nursing, usability eliminates errors such as bar-coded medication administration and leads to patient satisfaction as it allows nurses to spend more time with their patients (Koppel & Kuziemsky, 2019).

Researchers often report that EHR was increasing the amount of time that nurses spend with their patients. Changes were made to the system at one organization, and now users had to input passwords with each template that they opened, which was rather time-consuming. For example, when documenting on a single patient, one would need to input a password to access the medication administration, another password to access the patient assessment templet, flow sheet for input & output, skin assessment, etc. from a nursing point of view, I would rather have one password to access the computer system then another one to access the patient record. Once in a single patient domain, the users should click and open templates without a hitch. Better still, all assessments should be on one template. I questioned this and was informed that other departments, such as Quality Improvement, wanted the templates singled out to make their work easier.

The implementation of clinical information systems (CISs) denotes a new era of technological possibilities. It is always essential to include nursing in the implementation states of any HIT systems, as not doing so may make them unprepared to use the technology in performing their work. Nurses need to be educated on using the system, and their level of computer skills needs to be enhanced in readiness to adopt the new changes. This could result in a significant delay between creating the new healthcare enterprise and the end user’s ability to fulfill its potential (Gruber et al., 2019).

References

Gruber, D., Cummings, G., Leblanc, L. & Smith, D. (2009). Factors Influencing Outcomes of Clinical Information Systems Implementation. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 27 (3), 151-163. doi: 10.1097/NCN.0b013e31819f7c07.

Koppel, R., & Kuziemsky, C. (2019). Usability Across Health Information Technology Systems: Searching for Commonalities and Consistency. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 264, 649–653. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.3233/SHTI190303

Schlotzer, A., & Madsen, M. (2010). Health information systems: requirements and characteristics. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 151, 156–166.

Staggers, N. (2010). The rapidly emerging national interest in HIT usability. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 14(3), 4p.