Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox on Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design couldn’t have been timed better for me. Nielsen, a usability expert and consultant, picked up on a recent JAMA article that discussed a number of ways that poor usability and interface design can be significantly detrimental to patients. You might think that this is a little too nerdy for discussion, but the fact is that medical records will be electronic within in the next decade (or at least most of them will be), and unless we do a good job designing the system, and make it easy for medical staff to use, we risk only creating new types of medical errors, as opposed to using technology to eliminate the current ones. The article focuses on prescription drug errors, but there are plenty other systems that need a kick in the usability pants, too.

Take, for example, the radiology software Stanford uses, called PACS . It’s a GE Healthcare add-on to GE’s Centricity product, and has all-digital x-ray, CT, and MRI studies. It’s a network nightmare, and the backend is great, but the user interface is simply horrendous. I was given an introduction to the system, and it seems like it was thrown together at the last minute. Even the head of the Radiology residency doesn’t fully understand how to use the system. She said things like “I don’t know what this button does,” and “for some reason, the system requires that you do X, Y, then Z to locate a patient.”

The most ridiculous part is the fact that sometimes, for no explained reason, a note on an x-ray will disappear, and must be dragged back on screen. If you’re not aware of this “feature,” you can waste plenty of time trying to wish the note back again. It’s a shame that GE couldn’t think of a better implementation of its software-they should talk to Apple now and again.

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