NIST: Make EHRs more user-friendly

The National Institute of Standards (NIST), in conjunction with public and private sector stakeholders, has called on the healthcare community to help evaluate electronic health records (EHRs), examine the human factors that are crucial to their design, and assist with guidance on the development of usability engineering practices. An October 27 webcast focused on NIST's recently released Technical Evaluation, Testing, and Validation of the Usability of Electronic Health Records, draft guidelines that review the rationale for an EHR usability protocol (EUP). The guidelines outline procedures for expert evaluation of an EHR user interface from clinical and human factors best-practices perspectives.