EMR: A Solution for the United Kingdom's NHS

Designing for the Healthcare Sector

Instead of spending more on technology to solve problems that technology alone cannot answer, the healthcare sector is turning to User-Centred Design (UCD) to simplify and rationalise a patchwork of systems, and to make complicated processes intuitive. 

The Situation

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) promise faster, better care and significant financial savings. Embracing this promise, in 2002, the UK's National Health System (NHS) committed to providing centralised, electronic medical records for all citizens by 2010. Several years and billions of pounds later, the project remains far from achieving its goals. The media is rife with criticism levelled at huge IT contracts, chronic delays and poor system design. The general disappointment was perhaps best summed in The Guardian by Andrew Way, chief executive of Hampstead's Royal Free Hospital in London: "I had been led to believe it would all work." 

The Challenge

An EMR system for NHS - or for any healthcare system - requires the flexibility to gather and visualise data while accommodating tasks within many different medical settings and physician specialties. Moreover, systems must accommodate the hectic pace of real clinical settings and the diverse ways medical staff work with patients, record data, delegate tasks, and review results. With the NHS under pressure to justify expenditure and the national economy stretched tight, there is no more room for error or delay in NPfIT.

The Choices

Some hospitals and clinics are overwhelmed by new systems that require unreasonable training time, stall treatment and contribute to errors rather than improving care. Others have escaped the problems of new, poorly designed systems, but only by continuing to work with multiple legacy systems that make it difficult to assemble records and coordinate care.

The current choices are i) new systems that don't work, or ii) old systems that don't work well. Either choice wastes money and denies patients the best care available.

There is a third choice: User-Centred Design. By working with technology already in place - and with the people using this technology - systems can be improved, time and money recovered, productivity and efficiency increased, and lives saved. Electronic Ink's record of success in this sector is second to none.

The Opportunity

Electronic Ink's evidence-based, User-Centred Design process unites legacy systems to make your technology investment work for you, not against you. How do we do it? By asking the people who work with the systems day in and day out what they need. The doctors, nurses and other clinicians who coordinate care, order tests and prescribe medications. 

Stakeholder and User Interviews
We gather requirements up front to make sure the system meets financial, technological and clinical objectives.

Workflows, Storyboards, Product Maps
These robust, iterative design steps allow you to visualise exactly how the system will perform long before you gamble your budget on a long list of features and functions.

Wireframes, Lo-Tech Prototypes
These are working models. They enable stakeholders and users to ask questions, raise problems and suggest changes before the product design is complete. By allowing this conversation to take place at this stage, we are sure to design a product that will work, before beginning a costly build.

Electronic Ink's Role

Since 1990, we have been observing clinicians and administrators in actual clinical settings, and this insight into their real-world needs and wants is what informs our process. It provides our teams with accurate system requirements, earlier visions of the user interface, and pre-development proof that end users will be able to perform effectively with the system.

Electronic Ink's healthcare experience includes:

  • Merck
  • ICON Clinical
  • Endo Pharmaceuticals
  • Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
  • Wyeth
  • Magee Rehabilitation
  • AstraZeneca
  • QuadraMed
  • GlaxoSmithKline
  • CareScience, Inc.
  • Sunquest Information Systems
  • AVIO
  • PACE Health Management Systems
  • First Data Corp.'s Health Systems Group

Find out more about our experience. Read our Case Studies.