Usability Guidance for Optimising My Health Record Viewing Platforms in Acute Care

Summary

The Usability Guidance for Optimising My Health Record Viewing Platforms in Acute Care (the Guide) provides advice to software vendors and viewing platform owners on how to improve the user experience of viewing platforms that interface with My Health Record – Australia’s national electronic health record platform. 

Overview

The Guide was developed by the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency) and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (the Commission) and includes best-practice recommendations in user experience design to enable the optimisation of viewing platforms integrated within clinical workflows. 

This Guide identifies six areas of opportunity to improve the user experience of viewing platforms that interface with My Health Record and provides supporting recommendations on how to deliver these improvements under each opportunity area: 

1. Best practice product design processes and standards 

2. Transparency and visibility of record status and content 

3. Intuitive navigation and wayfinding 

4. User-centred information flow and display 

5. Clear and consistent labelling and terminology 

6. Usable and understandable emergency and restricted access controls 

For use in all Australian health services 

This Guide may be used by health service organisations procuring product design and development services to implement My Health Record into their software and to inform other procurement decisions and continuous quality improvement initiatives. Clinicians, as end-users of viewing platforms, are encouraged to use this Guide to advocate for improvements in the design and usability of the viewing platform software available in their health service where it is not yet optimised. While this Guide focuses on acute care, some of the recommendations are transferable to implementations of viewing platforms in other care settings in Australia.