Frectally speaking

As I’ve mentioned many times, the world is a complex place.

The field I’m most involved in, Healthcare is a complex endeavour, and the health IT industry I know well is complex. At the frontline the look and feel and usability of many health IT applications is overly complex.

So as we work to move forward and address the complexity of health IT and improve usability, one of the keys is to look for key patterns amidst the complexity and harness their power.

To improve usability in healthcare I’m sure that we need to identify and harness several key UI patterns… certainly within my own work I’ve found  few key patterns which hold up as a useful Clinical UI Pattern framework in a range of settings and technologies;

Back as an Informatics Fellow in Washington Hospital Center I spend time coding an application within a related framework that blended record navigation, structured data & narrative.. issues that remain pertinent to usability today.

During my time in Leeds a brief session towards a related UI framework with my colleague Dr Geoff Hall laid the foundations of the look and feel of the PPM+ platform and the Leeds Care Record.

Early ClinUiP work and NHS VistA work

The same approach has held up during exploratory efforts around a refresh of the open source VistA stack.

and now the same UI pattern is holding up well in the context of the Ripple OSI effort.

This update seemed in order as I’ve penned a related article for the Ripple Open Source Initiative, introducing its UI/UX framework… so you may be interested in checking that article out here..