The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a guide designed to improve electronic health record usability in pediatric care, FierceEMR reports.
Guide Details
The guide notes, "Pediatric patients have unique characteristics that translate into unique EHR usability challenges," adding, "It is not surprising, then, that the adoption of EHRs by pediatric care providers has lagged behind adoption for adult care providers."
NIST offered specific EHR usability recommendations related to:
- Alerts;
- Labs;
- Medications;
- Newborn care;
- Patient identification;
- Privacy;
- Radiology; and
- Vaccinations.
The recommendations that NIST identified as most important are:
- Displaying data in menu items and on charts or graphs without truncating key information, such as doses and measurement units;
- Enabling one-click access to the growth chart in the standard display format;
- Removing automated changes to adult doses for medication orders; and
- Protecting against ordering medications in the wrong units.
The guide also includes several suggestions for making pediatric EHR systems more innovative, such as adding charts for specific conditions, smart vaccine support and role-based access control for sensitive parts of patients' records (Hirsch, FierceEMR, 7/16).