IBM says healthcare is “driving under the influence of terrible interfaces”
“Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday,” as reported by InfoWorld.
IBM’s New Paradigms for Using Computers 2007 workshop focused on health care interfaces. Previous years’ workshops have covered such topics as Web 2.0 and mobile computing.
“Health care is moving in the direction of computerization, but there’s so many difficult issues in the user interface in particular that have not been addressed,” said John Barton, manager of Interaction Science at IBM.
Right now, health care is plagued by bad interfaces, said Paul Tang, vice president and chief medical officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif.
“It’s really driving under the influence of terrible interfaces,” he said. […]
Rather than just throwing computers at what are now paper processes, ethnography would help in figuring out what information is needed, said Tang.
