Medical technology is evolving and one particular area where a lot is happening is in robotic surgery. By moving the surgeon a couple of feet away from the operating table and into a comfy chair, we accomplish a few goals: relaxed surgeon, better view using keyhole techniques, filtering of movements, etc. But it’s only a [...]

It’s high time we got our signatures back. Since IT systems were introduced in healthcare, handwritten signatures have lost all importance, not because they’re superfluous, but because the IT application vendors can’t get a grip on how to implement them. And the weird thing is that all of us, including the authorities, just let this [...]

I’m often working as a GP in Sweden. The desktop computers we get are usually bog standard Dells, with all the excitement that goes with that…. not! (Think Borat.) All of them alike: boring but almost adequate. You can sit down at any one of them and start blindly typing away into the electronic patient [...]

I’ve been a bit quiet lately, but that’s here only. I’m spending most of my writing energy on a new blog over here that allows me to relieve myself of a lot of the frustrations I have about the rotten state of medical software. I’m one of the site’s “official bloggers”, whatever that means. If [...]

I figured I could start a series on “amazing UI” elements. Admittedly, practically all come from the multimillion electronic healthcare app I’m subjected to with frightening regularity. Just have a gander at this… note the expanse of grey to the right and the memo field with scroll bars squeezed into the upper part, with some [...]

Another user interface in a medical journal app, that I simply can’t let go by unremarked. I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of “inspired” (de-spired?) layout since the Visual Basic 1.0 cowboy days. You’d think that this would be your niece’s attempt at producing a form, but no, it’s a multimillion dollar electronic healthcare [...]

I’ve always been amazed at how bad vendors are at producing decent user interfaces for vertical apps in medicine. Not that I think they’re any better in other areas, but this is the domain I’m exposed to most. The other day I got a document with requirements for a new system that the Swedish social [...]

Today I got a questionnaire in the email asking for my opinion on a planned website for IT in healthcare. And, naturally, the questions were extremely biased. They asked things like:
“How important is it to be able to get information on new IT technology through the site?”
“How can we improve the understanding of IT among [...]

One of the medical applications I’ve had to use a lot has some really obnoxious user interface tricks. One of the worst is the following. There’s a window where you can set filtering requirements for what elements you want to see in the journal notes. It consists of a number of group boxes, each with [...]

I just set up my google coop engine which I call “Hyrläkarmaskinen”, i.e. “The Locum Tenens Machine”, or something like that. I’m an avid google user during consulting hours and this one comes prefiltered for my favourite medical info sites. Most are in English, some are Swedish, since that’s where I work.