Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

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UPenn site slammed in today's Nielson Alertbox

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 11 is now online at:

Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
    http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050411.html

Summary:
A field study identified twenty-two ways that automated hospital systems
can result in the wrong medication being dispensed to patients. Most of
these flaws are classic usability problems that have been understood for
decades.

In a recent Journal of the American Medical Association paper, Ross Koppel 
and colleagues reported on a field study of a hospital's order-entry 
system, which physicians use to specify patient medications. The study 
identified twenty-two ways in which the system caused patients to get the 
wrong medicine. Most of these issues are usability problems. I'll briefly 
discuss the ones of general interest here.

Misleading Default Values.
New Commands Not Checked Against Previous Ones.
Poor Readability.
top-ten usability heuristics

Methodology Weaknesses
To supplement their field observation of actual user behavior, the 
researchers administered a survey that asked hospital staff how often 
various errors had occurred during the previous three months. 
Unfortunately, the paper relies overly much on this self-reported data in 
estimating the impact of the usability problems. It's well known that 
people have a hard time remembering what they do with computers. Valid data 
comes from what people do, not what they say.

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