Recently, I watched my daughter head off to an interview for medical school. I realized that in four short years, she was on the path to becoming a member of the next generation of physicians – the future clinical software users – and a potential user of our MH-CURE software. It dawned on me that I had better find out what she might want in a clinical software product. To add further credibility to her views, she is the chief medical scribe at a top 10 nationally ranked hospital and has experienced first-hand their transition to Epic EMR. As a scribe who takes copious clinical documentation notes, charting in Epic continuously during her shift for each patient visit, she likely interacts with the EMR more often than any other clinician during a given shift. She also represents Gen Y, a generation whose smartphone is comparable to a hiker’s ever-present Swiss Army knife that can handle just about every need.

So the open question I posed to my daughter was: When you become a doctor, how do you want software to help you?

Her answers are below:

  1. I would like the software to show me seamless integration of information sorted by the technology itself. For instance, if a patient’s data has already been entered into some areas of the software, I would like to see the information relevant to my current task, such as having medical/family/social history, medications, and allergies pre-populated into an organized format in one place. Having information that has already been stored in a database appear automatically and readily accessible when and where you need it increases efficiency and helps ensure that no details are missed in the larger picture. The tricky part of this, I think, is displaying the information in a way that is readily available without being intrusive or interfering with the current task. I would also like the technology to alert me of significant findings, such as abnormal vital signs and medication interactions.
  2. I would love to be able to use my smartphone in a safe, protected, and HIPAA-compliant way to see data in real-time, such as how vital signs progress or change or to be able to pull up an imaging study in order to show it to a patient and discuss the findings. I can use my laptop to take clinical notes, but having the same software in the same format that is easy to navigate on my smartphone would allow me to better track information. I could then also easily access information at any time, since my smartphone is already always close by me.
  3. I really want to see more user-friendly, intuitive software. Software that has a fast learning curve and comes naturally takes the frustration out of adjusting to new technology. I think that software should have no more than one, simple way of doing each task to simplify a system that already must be quite complex to cover all of our needs.

So, there you have it. Fast forward four years and I may be presenting MH-CURE to my daughter. I can only hope that she responds, “Dad, I’m glad that, for once, you listened to me.”