Pandemic-era burnout: How EHR vendors are redesigning UI and UX to battle stress

In our seventh and final feature on burnout, experts at Epic, Cerner, Allscripts and Mad*Pow discuss health IT usability problems and solutions, and describe where user experience is headed.

Poorly designed, time-consuming electronic health record user interfaces are a common and longstanding complaint among doctors and nurses.

Interfaces that are not intuitive or that require too much effort to accomplish necessary recordkeeping can push clinicians – many of whom already are charting at home after hours – too far. It’s just more stress on top of existing burnout, especially during the pandemic.

In this seventh feature story in the Healthcare IT News Burnout in the Age of COVID-19 series, usability experts from three top EHR vendors and one top technology design firm outline the user interface/user experience problems that physicians and nurses have encountered, solutions to these problems, and where EHR and health IT usability is headed in the future.