Designing a Physician-friendly Interface for an Electronic Medical Record System

An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system enables a physician to record patients’ health information, request reports from third partly health care providers and retrieve these reports when they are ready. Despite the numerous benefits of EMRs, several factors have inhibited their widespread adoption. An underappreciated but critical factor has been the proliferation of inferior user interfaces which are confusing to navigate and disruptive to a physician’s workflow. To be useful, an EMR must allow physicians to record and query information in a natural manner that accommodates the non-linear nature of their workflow. In particular, an interface must permit a physician to record the minutiae of a patient’s condition while at the same time preserving the physician’s overview of a patient’s record so that any aspect of the patient’s health can be effortlessly queried and inspected. This paper proposes an interface design that attempts to address several of the usability deficiencies associated with current electronic medical record systems in use today.