(Entertainment-NewsWire.com, February 20, 2013 ) San Francisco, CA -- The Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs launched a contest aimed at redesigning the VA’s text-only patient record.
The move was made in order to generate ideas regarding developments the department says it needs in order to improve their products. The VA's MyHealththeVet portal is a system set to allow patents to access, download, and print out their own medical records through the blue button. When compared, the text-only blue-button document and a cash register receipt, Ryan Panchadsaram stated that the records indeed needed to be easier to use. That way, he noted, patients and their family members will find it easier to find what it is they need on the card.
The ONC has recently had a strong focus on the improvement of patient engagement, and has been making it a part of the criteria for qualifying the medicare and medicaid meaningful use of incentives. Doctors are applying for stage-2 to ensure that a minimum of 5% of pents download their reports through the use of the online portal.
That is why the ONC and VA had announced the contest nearly five months ago. The final design includes aspects from several entries from graphic designers, and will be made available on the code-sharing site Github for vendors to utilize with their products.
“Graphic designers have the unique ability to take something that exists, transform it, and make it more valuable and usable,” Panchadsaram wrote in an October blog post announcing the patient record contest.
The designs that ended up playing a part in the final product were chosen from over 200 entries. Three were selected in having the best overall design, while other entries were awarded for particular categories. Gravitytank, which is a Chicago design firm, won first place. The company noted that “couriers, bringing our records from one doctor to another without understanding what’s in them.” They said the records have provided pages of “impersonal stats” and “lists full of demographics, medical terminology and legal jargon that make us feel like lab specimens rather than unique individuals.” The design thus focused on making the records more dynamic, holistic, and more understandable overall.
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