ed-informatics.org

On occasion, an academic paper is published, but one of the following Letters to the Editor or editorial is much more important, with a longer-lasting influence than the original article. An example is an editorial about sore throats/tonsillitis by Dr. Centor, of Centor Criteria fame. Well, now we have similar situation in the field of […]

Let’s suppose it is 1980. Suppose someone shows up in your ED with a fever, and a history of travel to an area with a new plague characterized by fever. The nurse has heard about this on the news, asks the patient about travel to the area, and gets a “yes.” The nurse not only writes this on the paper […]

Fitts’s Law has been known since Paul Fitts first proposed it in 1954. Wikipedia has a detailed exposition of Fitts’s Law. In essence, it says that “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.” “Targets that are smaller […]

In Icons, Pedagogic Vectors, Forms Design and Posture we briefly discussed icon design. (Icons, in this context, meaning the sketch-pictures on buttons that you can click.) The bottom line was that it’s hard to learn and remember what icons stand for. In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we discussed how icons should be […]

I work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC has prioritized IT, and compared with many other academic medical centers, the IT department is fairly well-funded and well-staffed. The central IT umbrella spreads wide, including 16 major hospitals and numerous other facilities. UPMC uses Cerner for an inpatient electronic medical record (EMR) (and for […]