“My mission is to relieve physician suffering by improving usability of the software they use,” [Jeff Belden, MD] explains. “The problem right now is that doctors have to think really hard and what we know is that a lot of this stuff could be offloaded.”

Providing context-sensitive, timely information to physicians should be the ultimate goal for an EMR. Doctors should not spend much time at all gathering patient information to make a decision. Some companies are doing this by creating custom views for specific conditions like diabetes or patients requiring anti-coagulation.

What we really need is either (1) the ability to easily create our own custom views or (2) APIs that give developers access to the nuts and bolts of an EMR so they can create their own apps for viewing/entering data and writing orders.

The second solution is more difficult but far more appealing in that it has the potential to provide more robust solutions.