Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
- From: Educational CyberPlayGround <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: nethappenings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:02:19 -0400
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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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