National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): NIST GCR 15-996

Product description

NIST GCR 15-996, Technical Basis for User Interface Design of Health IT, is intended to help EHR developers plan and implement a user-centered design and evaluation process that ultimately leads to a safe and effective application. 

Challenge

Assess the state of electronic health records in use in the US, both in terms of how they are developed to meet users' expressed needs, and user interface design features that promise safe and effective use.

Solution

We conducted in a multi-year research effort to develop guidance on the process of designing a user-centered electronic health record and specific software user interface elements. Our work included observing and interviewing EHR users at several medical institutions, interviewing EHR developers on what they considered to be effective approaches to design, conducting usability tests of multiple EHRs, and developing extensive user interface design guidelines linked to known design problems and solutions.

Impact

NIST published NIST GCR 15-996, Technical Basis for User Interface Design of Health IT in 2015. Since then, it has served as a vital resource for the EHR development community, helping to promote and shape user-centered approaches to EHR development. Notably, the NIST document's content is now forming the basis for a new consensus standard on the same topic being developed by the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation's (AAMI's) Health Information Technology Standard HIT1000. Emergo by UL's Michael Wiklund, Mary Burton, and Alexandria Trombley participate on AAMI's standard development committee and help lead the development of the standard's human factors-related content.