MEDITECH Lead Designers co-author HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association blogs on accessibility

In recent blogs published by the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), MEDITECH Lead Designers Tammy Coutts and Michael Shonty describe their recent work to advance disability inclusion within EHR systems and update the EHRA’s Personas Library to include accessibility.

While EHRs are designed to improve usability, Coutts and Shonty write, “the features that make technology user-friendly for most can block healthcare professionals with disabilities from fully performing their core responsibilities.”

In their first blog, Disability Inclusion Part One: What is Accessibility and Why It’s Important for EHRs, Coutts and Shonty explain how some EHR features, like navigation with a mouse and color-coded alerts, may actually pose challenges to users with rheumatoid arthritis and vision deficiency, respectively. 

“Spending a day observing EHR users lays bare the accessibility issues with health IT tools, many of which are not obvious to anyone who has not been in the shoes of users with specific disabilities,” they write. 

Coutts and Shonty also note how the EHRA User Experience Work Group is considering the impact of disabilities on the user experience, and emphasize being aware of adaptive technologies that can improve accessibility for all users of the EHR.

The second blog, Disability Inclusion Part Two: Introducing Accessibility into Health IT Personas, focuses on how the EHRA is working to expand its Personas Library to include Accessibility Personas that reflect the unique and challenges that real users with disabilities face in using EHRs. These personas can help developers avoid excluding users when designing new solutions.

“Our goal with the Accessibility Personas Project is to build awareness and identify the often-unseen problems and bring forward a variety of solutions to ensure EHRs and other digital tools are useful and valuable additions to workflows and care delivery for all – regardless of whether or not they identify as having a disability,” Coutts and Shonty write.

By raising awareness of how EHR usability can be impacted by various disabilities, the EHRA User Experience Work Group aims to give EHR developers clear guidelines for how to build accessibility into their solutions.

“Knowing how different disabilities impact the healthcare professional’s use of technology provides us with the insights developers need to eliminate barriers and ensure that tools are not standing in the way of their ability to perform a job for which they are eminently qualified,” they write.

Read the blogs:

Disability Inclusion Part One: What is Accessibility and Why It’s Important for EHRs

Disability Inclusion Part Two: Introducing Accessibility into Health IT Personas