Anyone who works with technology development knows that there will be a time when someone will say, “That is a training issue”. This statement often comes after someone asks, “how will the user know how to do <insert workflow step>?”
Sometimes the technical steps are not necessarily intuitive to the user’s anticipation of what to do next. This is a mismatch in the user experience. When this occurs, the user has (at best) confusion in trying to identify the next step. The confusion can lead to extreme frustration that halts progress toward completing the next step in the process (and lost time).
Example: Pop Up Window Advertisements
Consider when you see a pop-up window to save you 10% on your first order for any given advertisement. You may or may not be interested in the welcome discount. If not, it can be quite difficult to find the “X” on the screen to exit the offer. You look around all four corners and sometimes need to locate the very faint area where you can exit out. If not found, you could exit the screen or put in your email to just get to what you wanted to see. (Of note, this is likely by design to obtain your email address ).
The lack of visibility of the “X” is a user experience or more specifically, a usability design issue. Sure, one could say it is a training issue and tell each person they need to look VERY CAREFULLY each time they accidentally find themselves with a discount offer. However, this becomes the user’s issue rather than the system design issue that removes this extra step. This usability design issue turns into a training issue. The usability shifts from the responsibility of the system designers to that of the individual to “learn” how to “workaround” the intended design.
Healthcare Training Issues
Now, let us look at healthcare. Healthcare is dependent upon clinical and administrative information systems to manage the individual and population level care. However, most clinicians are not formally educated on the foundations of informatics and/or information system design. Therefore, there is an inherent concern and perhaps intimidation faced where there is concern about whether they are charting the right way.
Some clinicians will over chart while others will struggle to know what exactly needs to be charted and may unintentionally miss something. The extremes here are a result of a culture, especially in nursing, of “if it is not documented, it is not done”. However, when it becomes hard to know where to go next or how to enter some data correctly, you see the (largely unintentional) risk of error. Add to this baseline, a handful of “training issues” and we have just added more stress to an already stressed and fatigued workforce.
Of course there are some aspects that do require training. However, for a moment think about how many times you have turned to watch a video or training session to use your new smart phone. Much of what you need to be able to do with your smart phone or device can be figured out without a training session.
We should be striving for this type of user experience with healthcare technology. The need for formal training sessions should be minimal or very brief. Instead, the design of the systems should be such that the user is able to follow what the next step is through an intuitive human computer interaction experience.
There is an abundance of qualitative and quantitative data to show that nurses, doctors, and healthcare professionals in general are working against the clock each day. There are never enough minutes to go around for everything that needs to get done in that shift. To add more things to what is expected of them will only increase the burden felt rather than create relief.
Healthcare cannot be delivered without the use of technology. However, we must consider that we have a workforce already spread thin. Instead of putting more responsibility through “training issues”, why not create a sense of ease and/or intuitive flow for them to experience each day?
If you are anything like me, you see ways to make improvements wherever you go and wonder why something is the way it is…
As nurses and healthcare professionals we need to make improvements often through workarounds to get our work done.
In this piece, I describe those innovative behaviors through workarounds in the context of neonatal nurse environments.
Workarounds are clues that something could be done better, often at a system (and not individual) level. “Do you consider yourself to be an innovative nurse? The concept of innovation is frequently permeating conversations around the future of nursing. Many may hear the term innovation, and wonder “what does it really mean to me as a nurse?” and others may think “innovation does not really apply to me.” Yet, you may be surprised to learn that you are innovating in your role as a nurse every day in your work..”
To read the full article, Workarounds as the Catalyst to Drive a Culture of Innovation, click here.
To celebrate the day, I attended an event held on behalf of UCONN at the Mark Twain House in Hartford CT.
I learned quite a bit…
February 11th is National Inventor’s Day because it is Thomas Edison’s birthday (inventor of the ?). The first patent issued from the USPTO was in 1790.
The first patent was issued to Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain). A total of 3 patents were issued that year. Today, there are approximately 320K patents issued each year.
Dr. Eric Hintz, a historian from the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for Innovation and Invention spoke to us tonight on several historical ecosystems and their foundational areas of invention influence.
One thing I found quite interesting is that Henry Ford wasn’t the first one to create cars. They were first called ‘horseless carriages’ by Hiram Percy Maxim in 1896. He invented them in Connecticut nearly 20 years before Ford due to market saturation of the bicycle.
If you ever get the chance to go to the Mark Twain house, I encourage it. The same is true for the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for Innovation and Invention. I had the pleasure of speaking there two years ago next month and it was a fabulous experience. Below is a memory of that event in their 2017 Annual Report.
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