After working in healthcare IT, I can atleast attest to the general UI clunkiness and terrible software quality that is prevalent in the industry.
Innovation in Health IT happens usually because CMS (Agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid etc) looks at the landscape and comes up with a carrot / stick rewards system to force Hospitals and practices to update their software. They generally do things like:
* Hey you need to store records electronically. If you do this by X, you will get Y$. If not, you will be penalized Z$ every year after X.
* Hey the system you built - It needs to actually be able to talk to other systems. If you do this by X.. you get the point.
* The data you're collecting in your system is stupid. We need X, Y and Z reports to ensure you're actually using the system as we meant for you to use the system. Do this by X.
Several other misc things I noticed:
The industry by itself is extremely complex with business requirements that vary between hospitals, practices, labs and so on. This makes connecting systems together a nightmare. Even when you manage to integrate systems, each hospital and practice has a set of business practices (forms they collect, the way they organize information etc) that make rolling software out very hard. Configurability is king. Making everything configurable and having configuration engineers set things up makes automated testing very hard at a UI level. This leads to some sharp corners and contributes to bugs and general UX clunkiness.
Standards are out of date and the only thing pushing innovation here is CMS doing its best. The problem with this is that they're a govt agency, so they're generally slow and they're an insurance company, so their primary motivation is to cut cost of care.
Doctors are generally smart, and you can sometimes get good feedback from them, but they're already overworked and can't really vocalize what they find frustrating about software.
I hate to generalize, but in my experience atleast, all other people (middle management, front-desk staff) are useless. By that I mean they just don't understand how software works.
There are some smart CIOs, but they care about their position and the hospital bottom-line, so trying to sell them something that doesn't exactly line up with the CMS carrot / stick model is basically impossible.
Innovation in Health IT happens usually because CMS (Agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid etc) looks at the landscape and comes up with a carrot / stick rewards system to force Hospitals and practices to update their software. They generally do things like:
* Hey you need to store records electronically. If you do this by X, you will get Y$. If not, you will be penalized Z$ every year after X.
* Hey the system you built - It needs to actually be able to talk to other systems. If you do this by X.. you get the point.
* The data you're collecting in your system is stupid. We need X, Y and Z reports to ensure you're actually using the system as we meant for you to use the system. Do this by X.
Several other misc things I noticed:
The industry by itself is extremely complex with business requirements that vary between hospitals, practices, labs and so on. This makes connecting systems together a nightmare. Even when you manage to integrate systems, each hospital and practice has a set of business practices (forms they collect, the way they organize information etc) that make rolling software out very hard. Configurability is king. Making everything configurable and having configuration engineers set things up makes automated testing very hard at a UI level. This leads to some sharp corners and contributes to bugs and general UX clunkiness.
UX design isn't generally valued and suits / "business requirements" / timelines are prioritised over usable, stable, secure software. This is a typical UI: http://uxpajournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/smelcer3.g...
Standards are out of date and the only thing pushing innovation here is CMS doing its best. The problem with this is that they're a govt agency, so they're generally slow and they're an insurance company, so their primary motivation is to cut cost of care.
Doctors are generally smart, and you can sometimes get good feedback from them, but they're already overworked and can't really vocalize what they find frustrating about software.
I hate to generalize, but in my experience atleast, all other people (middle management, front-desk staff) are useless. By that I mean they just don't understand how software works.
There are some smart CIOs, but they care about their position and the hospital bottom-line, so trying to sell them something that doesn't exactly line up with the CMS carrot / stick model is basically impossible.