ed-informatics.org

One important medical computer application (hereinafter “app”) is a PACS system. PACS stands for “Picture archiving and communication system.” (PACS system is redundant, but so be it.). Wikpedia has a nice explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_archiving_and_communication_system. For emergency physicians, it’s where we usually view X-rays and CT scans, and enter “wet reads” (our preliminary interpretations of X-rays, […]

The Federal government has warped the fabric of healthcare. By giving away money. They’ve done this both to doctors’ offices and hospitals, for “meaningful use” of healthcare information technology. You get the money only if you use software that the Feds certified to meet their criteria. This is supposed to get us to rapidly have […]

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 […]

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 […]

A common technique for prototyping computer screens is to use wireframes. A recent article in UXmatters discusses wireframes, and asks whether wireframe prototypes are used by program designers as a substitute for real collaboration. That’s a good question. But I think this is a better one: is showing wireframes to people a poor substitute for […]