Sunday, March 10, 2013

Far more concern about Linux user experience than the EHR user experience, and your life does not depend on the former

I find this ironic and striking:

During my informatics postdoc I used a SparcStation-2 running UNIX and an old X Windows user interface.  Then a few years later, in the Windows 95 days, I installed Linux (an open-source UNIX-like operating system) on a PC and used various X Windows user interfaces on that, too.  There was a lot of debate on which features of which user interface made for the best usability, and more broadly, user experience.

This debate continues as Linux in its multiple versions continues to be extremely popular.

If the health IT sellers put as much time into considering the user experience presented by their products as does the Linux community and were as candid, as, say, the Ubuntu Linux community as here, there might not be physician rebellion groups like Twitter's #EHRbacklash springing up.

-- SS

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