Research company Frost & Sullivan have released their latest health IT report, EHR Usability—CIOs Weigh in On What’s Needed to Improve Information Retrieval.  The study is a part of the company’s Connected Health Grwoth Partnership Serive program. The research was conducted through an online survey of health IT professionals working in hospitals. The study was conducted in conjunction with CHIME and looks at key issues affecting access to structured and unstructured clinical data contained in EHRs.
The report finds that as the market matures and the volume of EHR data increases, getting reliable information from EHRs at the point-of-care will become a priority for providers. The research company has provided complimentary access to an abstract of the full report. You can download abstract here.
The authors of the report say that despite progress in EHR adoption, pitfalls remain. Key findings from the report look at provider pain points including:
- Slow and inaccurate information retrieval from EHRs as well as difficulty in finding and reviewing data, both of which result in productivity losses for clinician end-users as well as potential risks to patient safety.
- EHR usability is hampered by inability to create targeted queries or easily access unstructured data such as clinician notes.
- Time-consuming data entry tasks.
In a statement released by Frost & Sullivan,Principal Analyst Nancy Fabozzi (@NancyFabozzi) said “U.S. regulatory authorities will take notice of the growing chorus of complaints about EHR usability, resulting in a push to devote more resources to solving this issue. Further, the high levels of end-user frustration with usability present strong business opportunities for pioneering technology vendors.”
The report highlights Natural language processing (NLP) and visualization dashboards as technologies most suitable to improve EHR usability. NLP can produce readable summaries of unstructured text, helping clinicians retrieve information needed for point-of-care decision making.
“Data visualization dashboards will enable end-users to quickly understand data trends, significantly enhancing ease-of-use by streamlining and organizing vast amounts of data,” added Fabozzi. “The ability to triangulate EHR data with data from other sources is also crucial to ensure access to the right medical information for healthcare providers.”
Download a comprehensive asbstract of EHR Usability – CIOs Weigh in On What’s Needed to Improve Information Retrieval.