Improving the Human Computer Interface Design for a Physician Order Entry System

The computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system has become a primary focus of time and monetary investment in the healthcare arena. This focus is partly due to the need to reduce medical errors that occur due to illegibility, drug interactions, and misplaced decimals. A CPOE system can potentially prevent many of these errors, resulting in a significantly safer healthcare system. However, only one-third of the hospitals in the United States have installed CPOE systems, and only 1 percent of these require the physicians to use them.1 The success and failure of such a system is dependent on the acceptance by the users, in this case, the physicians. Unfortunately, many of the CPOE systems are not designed to address usability issues. They are hard to use, hard to learn, and they often generate user frustrations and abandonment. In this project, the user interface of one such software program was analyzed. As a result of this analysis, a prototype was developed as a component of the system to offer alternative solutions to the identified usability problems.