Eric Wicklund:

… [Michael Jordan, MD] feels that mHealth and EHRs are uncomfortable dance partners at present, but will get into rhythm once providers (and EHR vendors) learn how to sort through the data to offer doctors what they need at the point of care.

A little difficult to decipher what exactly ‘providers’ means in that sentence, but the overall message is that people other than doctors need to figure digital workflows and relevant data for doctors.

This is one of my biggest concerns with digital medicine—people without any medical training or experience treating patients are creating the tools doctors rely on everyday. I firmly believe this is why the first few generations of EMRs have been poorly designed for clinical workflows.

We need doctors to lead the user experience design for the next generation of digital medical tools [1]. Doctors with experience and training in the myriad aspects of technology and data need to sit with designers and programmers and work cooperatively to create a great experience for using such tools in any clinical setting. It needs to be magical and delightful.

I am talking specifically about the user experience not the actual user interface, data structures, networking, programming, etc. I’m also talking specifically about the digital medical tools doctors (and other providers) will use; not patient portals, mHealth tools, or the like. ↩