CHICAGO – If you think electronic medical record usability means user satisfaction, guess again. Or better yet, listen to the closing HIMSS Virtual Conference keynote this afternoon at 1:30pm CT.

While meaningful use criteria don’t address measures of usability, usability affects adoption rates, efficiency, training and support costs, said Jeffrey Belden, MD.

In his session, “Understanding the Landscape of EMR Usability: Implications for ARRA and Beyond,” Belden defines usability and the 10 principles of usability.

An associate professor of Clinical Family Medicine at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and on the affiliated faculty at the Information Experience Lab, Belden will drill down on the principles of simplicity, naturalness, consistency, minimizing cognitive load, efficient interactions, forgiveness, feedback, effective use of language, effective information presentation and preservation of context.

Attendees will be given a checklist of things to look for when assessing an EMR product’s usability or when implementing and configuring an existing EMR.

Belden, who serves a chairman of the HIMSS EMR Usability Task Force, will also reveal how certification organizations can incorporate usability assessment in their standards.

“A vast majority of physicians are dissatisfied with the usability of their EMRs,” he said. Complaints range from clunkiness to the system taking too much time to do tasks such as documenting progress notes.

Belden advocates for a partnership among vendors, users and implementation teams to address this prevalent problem. “If you implement poorly, you make usability worse,” he pointed out. “If users and software developers work together, they can detect problems early.”

He has a special interest in improving EMR usability and the visual display of information. As part of the affiliated faculty at the University of Missouri’s IE Lab, he collaborates with human-computer interaction colleagues.

Belden works on the University of Missouri’s collaborative project with Cerner on enhancing the company’s ambulatory EMR. He also brings experience in the areas of user training, implementations and product development collaboration.