I mean, they are tired of EHR software crying wolf with too many drug interaction warnings. Embattled users simply dismiss all drug interaction warnings without reading them. Mild or theoretical interactions should be suppressable by individual user preference, as a default setting.
This is a significant patient safety issue.
If I am relying on my software to warn me about serious drug interactions, then the warnings about milder or dubious interactions are annoying, distracting false alarms. I need to be aware of serious interactions, so I can adjust therapy.
Here's another problem: I get warned that drug A interacts with drug B. I dismiss the warning. Then I immediately get warned that drug B interacts with drug A. I know that!
Worse yet, if I then change the dose of drug A, I get warned all over again. We need smarter systems now, geared to what fallable, imperfect, tired human users need, and geared to keeping patients safe.
Here is a modest proposal of a way to display drug interactions.
Note that the key findings are in the middle, the drug names are prominent, the severity level is great big number, and user pref settings are right there. Click the image to zoom in.
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6 comments:
this is great...would like something like this for the discussion Feb12th in my class. I'll call you soon to figure out a time to focus on how to present something like this.
Markita
Andrew,
I'm addressing a reality. Doctors ignore the overwhelming volume of meaningless alerts.
Our tools need to adapt to what human psychology research shows us.
Doctors won't want to ignore all alerts. They just want to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
It would be great to iterate a series of sketches of various parts of the design, like Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.
Explore the concept of sketch to wireframe to working mock-up.
I found a few typos and they annoyed me:
I think this is a great solution to an ever growing problem. I think you're hitting on a bigger issue of allowing physicians the ability to customize their alerts.
Although the customization of alerts increases the satisfaction of the end user, how do we ensure physicians are still getting the benefit of the alerts? Should a standard be set? Will future governmental regulation limit our ability to customize end user experiences? If a mistake is made, are physicians held accountable for limiting the alerts they see through customization? Should some mechanism be in place to record when the physician opts out of an alert or actively declines an alert?
I definitely agree that more sophisticated alerts and customization of alerts are features necessary for the future of CDSS, but I think we should be cautious when deciding to ignore alerts or eliminating alerts from the end-user experience.
I definitely understand where you are coming from with improving the "signal-to-noise" ratio (great term!!). I was just playing devil's advocate by thinking of some of the unintended consequences.
I definitely think a change needs to be made and I really like your approach :)
As far as sketch-to-wireframe-to-mockup is concerned, there may be some nice touch screen applications out there( or coming out because of Windows7) that could help. I'll see what I can find and get back to you.
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