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Faced with a long dinner menu, it’s hard to decide what to order. (Even with a medium-sized menu, my wife always says “You go ahead and order, I haven’t decided yet.” But that’s extreme.) It’s not just an urban legend. There are scientific studies that demonstrate it. The study When Choice is Demotivating by Sheena […]

In the Beginning: VoiceEM Back in 1988, Ray Kurzweil came out with speech-recognition software, including something called VoiceEM. It was an emergency medicine physician charting application; there was also VoiceRAD for radiology. These were DOS programs that ran with that typical DOS 80 character x 25 character text screen. In addition to having a medical-specific vocabulary, VoiceEM had […]

Neatness counts. Trying to find my way from the entrance of my 12 year old daughter’s bedroom to the bed to kiss her goodnight, especially if barefoot, is considerably more dangerous than most of the search and rescue and disaster operations I’ve been on. Navigating the screens of medical software often seems like walking in […]

When using a point-and-click medical charting application (of which there are a zillion, and I think I’ve used maybe a half-zillion) there are many designs, but I’ve recently realized there is a way to divide them into two types. There are one-layer charting apps and two-layer charting apps. I’m not talking about computer layers, I’m […]

I was just a few seconds ago scanning a page of possible tests in the program DocuTAP, a list of about fifty items, to enter an order for an EKG. On the list, everything is in ALL CAPS. Even though I knew the approximate location of what I was looking for, it took me a long […]