User Centric’s Robert Schumacher Co-Authors First Document to Outline "User-Centered Design" Processes for the EHR Industry

Robert Schumacher, Managing Director of User Centric, has co-authored a recently released document that focuses on usability testing and evaluation of EHR systems.  Part of a federal effort, the NIST Guide to the Processes Approach for Improving the Usability of Electronic Health Records(NISTIR 7741) serves as guidance for EHR vendors on how they can approach usability and how to report usability test findings. 

A member of the National Research Council’s Committee on the Role of Human Factors in Home Healthcare and Co-director of the Program on Usability Enhancement in Health Information Technology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Robert Schumacher has been actively involved in developing usability criteria for these systems and is often called on to lend his expertise on the usability of this technology.

User Centric received attention from the HIT community in early 2009 after publishing two studies on EHR adoption and PHR usability.  Those studies, in addition to the breadth and depth of experience User Centric has in the Healthcare industry, have lead to speaking invitations to national conferences and local HIT organizations, the production of an engaging healthcare webinar series, as well as the opportunity to aid the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) in developing the 2011 Usability Testing Guide for Ambulatory EHR systems.

Visit http://www.nist.gov/healthcare/hit/hit_120810.cfm to read the announcement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.