In my last post, I talked about a bill I received from a lab in error. The mistake was resolved, but not without some effort on my part. According to an article in Huffpo one researcher found that 30-40 percent of bills have mistakes and another researcher found the occurrence to be much higher than that. That lends the question, where do the billing mistakes happen? Who bears the cost? What can we do about this enormous problem?

A lot of mistakes are user error entering data. Judging from the poor UX of the patient portal I was using, I’m sure that the interface used for billing is equally clunky and obstructive. I decided to poke around and see for myself.

Looking at some of the screenshots of the EHR systems being used, it’s no wonder that there are so many mistakes. There is a lot of information on each page, navigation is not organized and some of the color schemes made it all look like mush.

These complex systems take months of training to be able to use and there are plenty of people in healthcare that are not computer savvy that may never be comfortable using one. That seems like a recipe for mistakes.

Good UX/UI practices shouldn’t be reserved just for the big consumer-based interfaces (Facebook, Google, Amazon). And they are not, do you think the folks in finance or sales would tolerate a less-than-stellar interface? Medical software needs these techniques and tools now more than ever, as the systems become more complex. EHR companies need to invest in usability and their clients need to demand better, or maybe take a page from Hertz's playbook...