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I am reading a document by the information designer David Sless. He describes the process of designing usable medicines information. The medicine information is to be placed on medicine packaging and medicine leaflets. In the introduction, he described the shift of Australian regulators form focusing on the content of medicine labeling to the performance of these labels. This meant the shift from what labels should contain to what consumers should be able to do with labels. Labels had to meat benchmarks. The key benchmark put by Communication Research Institute of Australia for medicine labeling is:

100% of literate people tested should be able to find and use at least 80% of the information they look for.

Within EMR interfaces and documents, there is a focus on what these documents should contain. An example what should a laboratory report contain, or what should a discharge summary contain. Should we also focus on the performance of EMRs instead of contents of EMRs?

If we do go ahead with focusing on the performance and not the content of EMRs, we may end up with similar EMRs. This is because of varied reasons. However, this shift of the way of thinking should be a good exercise that has the potential to transform EMRs. This exercise will lead us to agree on user related metrics to assess EMRs. Even more important, we would need to agree on the true goal of EMRs.

In the coming post I will try to find out the true goal of EMRs.