Patients will benefit from a better user experience for their health providers.

Will Doctor Tested Software Lead to Better Patient Outcomes?

4 min readJun 7, 2015

Who is Designing for the Health Provider User Experience?

Modern cars work very well. Each new model is slightly more reliable, safer, and fuel-efficient. Yet the user experience remains the same: sit, steer and hope traffic is better than yesterday.

So it seems with our health system. Despite the innovation wave, the most important contributors to health, even clinical outcomes, appear to be lifestyle: nutrition and exercise. Neither requires sophisticated health infrastructure, consumer gadgets or the latest software update.

That is not to dismiss progress. With over 6,000 rare conditions (here), science will continue to push the envelope. Yet if you have logged onto a patient health portal recently, you know user design remains a work in progress. Hospital and health provider systems are little better.

So how can we improve technology critical to health delivery? Doctor Robert Wachter’s well written and researched, “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age,” gives us an insider’s view.

Wachter begins with a touching story, describing a young hospital patient who received a drug dose thirty-nine times (39x) greater than intended. A fluke? A doctor, pharmacist, modern health records system, state of the art automated drug dispensary and finally a nurse — who unwrapped each pill — contributed to this near fatal accident. Although each may be competent individually, studies show complex processes introduce unanticipated errors. While solving for too many masters, we can design systems that satisfy too few, and often the wrong ones.

The backdrop to Wachter’s story is the patient record, not long ago a paper file stuffed with charts and notes, often indecipherable. As digitization ensued new organizations — government, insurers, malpractice attorneys — found they could readily obtain information for their own purposes. Aware of the expanded audience, doctors’ notes became more restrained and the “data” infrastructure doubled as the new compensation mechanism. Reimbursements require knowing what was done and by whom, now lifted straight from the patients’ file.

How do we focus technology to assist the actual user, while improving safety and patient outcomes? Wachter offers Boeing’s airplane cockpit design as an intriguing example. Designed not to overload the operator, cockpit instruments and warning indicators only “make the cut” on new planes after rigorous user (i.e., pilot) testing. Information for information’s sake is simply not allowed. Similarly, user interfaces must be prioritized in the next generation of health IT technology.

However, unlike the aviation industry where each error receives national attention, health mishaps are much more isolated, and often hard to quantify. Exhaustive accident reconstruction and lessons learned (and shared) may run against the cultural grain. Further, the business case for health provider-friendly technology may be soft. Health patients may not be as lucky as airline passengers.

But in the end Wachter’s story is hopeful. The man-machine interface will improve. Much as Apple raised our expectation for how technology should feel effortless, industries that rely on technology — which is to say, all industries — will elevate their game.

This will happen, though maybe not in time for your next doctor visit.

Thanks for reading. Comments and suggestions for other topics welcome.

Below are my reviews of popular titles in the health space:

· Dr. Eric Topol’s “The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands” here.

· Steven Brill’s “America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System” here.

· Athenahealth Co-Founder and CEO, Jonathan Bush, “Where Does It Hurt: An Entreprenuer’s Guide to Fixing Health Care” here.

· Dr. Marty Makary’s “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Healthcare” here.

· Frank Sloan’s and Lindsey Chepke’s, “Medical Malpractice” here.

· Barry Werth’s, “The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma” here.

· Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” here.

I’ve also written about nutrition, money, behavior and other (mostly) related topics. On LinkedIn and Medium.

HSA Coach. Health is WealthTM