Ben Shneiderman featured on NPR's Kojo Nnamdi Show

On October 30, 2013, Ben Shneiderman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and founder of the Human Computer Interaction Lab was featured on the NPR Kojo Nnamdi Show on Improving Electronic Health Records. Shneiderman conducts numerous research projects and has garnered many awards for his work in human-computer interaction, user interface design, information visualization and social media. One of his projects is User Interface Designs for Electronic Health Record Systems, which studies and proposes novel interfaces for the following problems: medication reconciliation, results management, reducing wrong patient selection errors, visual comparison of treatment outcomes, visualization techniques for EHR data, and understanding patterns of patient discharge summaries.

As one of the nine institutions participating in the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare initiative, the University of Maryland and Shneiderman’s team receive funding through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (the national director of this office also spoke on the Kojo Nnamdi show with Shneiderman) under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program. The usability solutions developed by Shneiderman’s teams seek to remedy usability issues such as inconsistent and poor user design across different electronic medical record systems, says Shneiderman on the Kojo Nnambi Show. These usability issues make doctor’s response times slower and, especially in emergency room systems, these issues can be life threatening and costly, as noted by Dan Morhaim, a doctor who spoke on the Kojo Nnambi show with Shneiderman.  Despite the magnitude of these interface issues, Shneiderman and his team are quickly creating effective, well-received solutions:

“[we] develop[ed] a [solution that] simplifies, speeds and most importantly…increases the quality of decision making. And that design, when I presented it…at a medical conference…I not only got applause and cheers, but many people remember I got a standing ovation.”

Stay informed about the University of Maryland HCIL SHARP project here.

Learn More:

• NPR Kojo Nnambi on Improving Electronic Health Records
• Ben Shneiderman’s personal website
• University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies website
• HCIL website
• National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD)
• Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT