The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Human Factors Engineering team recognizes the value of journey maps as a means for communication among stakeholder groups and develops maps to showcase the experience of users with health services and technology systems. The uniqueness of health care environments caused difficulties in following available trade guidance for creating journey maps. Anticipating that other Human Factors Engineers working in health care settings will encounter similar challenges, this paper showcases our lessons learned while creating two distinct journey maps and offers a process for constructing journey maps in health care environments. We learned to selectively limit the content of journey maps, ensure design quality by utilizing a template and rubric, and apply alternate approaches for data gathering. Our improved process includes steps to partner with stakeholders, produce a journey map framework and confirm it with user research, and visualize findings in the completed journey map.
BackgroundThe promise of Health Information Exchange (HIE) systems rests in their potential to provide clinicians and administrative staff rapid access to relevant patient data to support judgement and decision-making. However, HIE systems can have usability and technical issues, as well as fail to support user workflow.ObjectiveShare the findings from a series of studies that address HIE system deficiencies for an Electronic Health Record (EHR) viewer which accesses multiple data sources.MethodsA variety of methods were used, in a series of studies, to gain a better understanding of issues and their mitigation through use of promising EHR viewer features.ResultsThe study series results are presented by the themes that underscore the importance for users to distinguish between data that are available but missing due to connection or system errors, data that are omitted entirely because they are not available and data that are excluded due to filtered search criteria.ConclusionsThe principal findings from this study series led to improvement recommendations for the EHR viewer, as well as citing areas that are ripe for further investigation and analysis.
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