Improving Clinician Experience with UI/UX Customizations in OpenEMR
Healthcare firms embrace OpenEMR because it is cost-effective and flexible. However, for busy professionals, the interface usually fails when used outside of the box. Complex or uncomfortable layouts impede workflow. It frustrates providers. Over time, poor usability becomes more than an inconvenience. It contributes to stress and even clinician burnout.
The advantage is that OpenEMR is open source. Healthcare IT teams can now freely customize the system’s interface and user experience. To build an interface that serves physicians rather than inhibits them, teams can redesign dashboards, eliminate forms, and speed navigation. Even minor improvements, such as mobile-friendly layouts or cleaner themes, can have a significant impact on everyday use.
OpenEMR evolves from a basic EHR into a platform that physicians can easily utilize with careful customization. The outcomes include improved usability, enhanced satisfaction, and more effective patient care.
Why EHR UI/UX Matters for Clinicians
A powerful EHR interface covers the system’s complexity. It gives doctors only what they require, when they require it. This simplicity lessens irritation and mistakes.
Many legacy EHRs were not designed with clinicians in mind, which is the issue. They were created with billing and compliance in mind. Their interfaces are therefore crowded, unclear, and frequently conceal important features. Documentation is slowed down by these inefficient systems. They even jeopardize patient safety in some situations. It should come as no surprise that researchers continue to associate physician burnout with EHR dissatisfaction.
According to one survey, 61% of doctors who experienced fatigue cited the EHR as a key contributing factor. The quality of care and the well-being of clinicians deteriorate when they spend more time clicking through countless screens than interacting with patients.
User-centered design is the answer. The experience is enhanced when the software replicates actual clinical workflows. Providers can devote more time to patient care and less time to battling the interface. Documentation time is reduced by UI features that are optimized, such as logical menus, sensible defaults, and clear iconography. Clinicians complete charts more quickly and with less mental strain.
Ultimately, UI/UX encompasses more than just design. It has a direct effect on clinicians’ well-being, productivity, and error rates.
OpenEMR’s Interface Challenges and Opportunities
Although OpenEMR is a powerful, open-source EHR software, there have long been usability issues with its default UI.
- The design may seem antiquated and out of step with certain user roles or workflows. For instance, many users find the OpenEMR patient dashboard panel confusing and overwhelming because it shows a combination of clinical and administrative data in one view, with about 20 sections. This implies that in order to locate the clinical data they require, a healthcare provider may need to go through billing or demographic information, and vice versa. Such bloat on the screen forces extra scrolling and hunting for the right data, contributing to screen fatigue.
- Navigation in the default OpenEMR can also be non-intuitive for new users. There are numerous menus and tabs, and not all are relevant to every role. Without personalization, there could be visual noise as a clinician sees fields or menu choices they hardly ever utilize.
- Even though OpenEMR has developed over time, some screens might not be completely optimized for tablets or smartphones because it was first created for desktop use. In an era where providers switch between office computers, tablets on rounds, and even smartphones, any interface not adapted to multiple devices can slow down care delivery.
The opportunity is that OpenEMR’s open architecture and active community have been working to improve this. Recent versions of OpenEMR introduced a modernized UI built on Bootstrap (a responsive CSS framework) to ensure the layout adapts to various screen sizes.
A new “Modern” theme and design system has been developed to give the software a cleaner look while standardizing components for consistency.
OpenEMR also added support for role-based menus and multiple UI themes, allowing some degree of personalization out of the box. And the latest patient dashboard uses a card-based design with a continuous scroll, rather than pop-ups, to reduce complexity. Interestingly, administrators can use settings to streamline the display by hiding or collapsing specific dashboard cards.
These enhancements demonstrate that OpenEMR is moving in the right direction, but they also highlight the necessity of additional customisation to satisfy the particular requirements of any organization. Every practice is different. What feels intuitive for a family clinic might still be cumbersome in a surgical department. This is where UI/UX customizations come in.
Key UI/UX Customizations to Improve Clinician Experience in OpenEMR
Consider the following OpenEMR UI/UX changes when designing a clinician-friendly EHR. These changes connect the UI with real workflows and address well-known problem areas:
Related: 7 UI/UX Enhancements in OpenEMR That Elevate Healthcare Delivery
1. Streamlined Dashboards & Navigation
To prevent providers from being inundated with information, keep the main screens minimal. The patient summary is already divided into several sections for clinical and administrative information in many organizations.
- For instance, the OpenEMR community has proposed adding two tabs, “Clinical” and “Demographic,” in place of the current “Dashboard” tab.
- Only the information pertinent to each tab’s function would be displayed.
- Clinicians and staff are able to operate more effectively with this method.
- In a single screen, a doctor can concentrate on labs, prescriptions, and vital signs.
- Office workers can handle billing, insurance, and demographics in another.
- Even without a thorough redesign, you may decrease clutter by turning off non-essential widgets in the dashboard.
- Providers can access only the data they require thanks to OpenEMR’s appearance settings.
- Navigation is also very important.
- Menus can be trimmed or rearranged such that just a limited number of options are visible to each role.
- Role-based menus are supported by OpenEMR, allowing a front desk receptionist to see one set of navigation options while a nurse sees another.
By doing this, physicians are kept from becoming sidetracked by pointless tabs.
Effective design techniques have a significant impact. Shorter menus, foldable sidebars, and clear icons all enhance usability, particularly on smaller displays.
Providers can locate patients or reports more rapidly and with fewer clicks by using quick-access buttons or a large search bar with auto-complete.
2. Role-Based Personalization
The EHR is necessary for a variety of healthcare roles. Administrators, billing personnel, nurses, and doctors all use the system in different ways. Customizing the user interface for each of these personas is made feasible by OpenEMR.
Consider dashboards as an illustration. The appointments for today, patient messages, and important lab results may be the main focus of a provider’s dashboard. In contrast, a billing manager’s dashboard might emphasize invoices and claims. You can eliminate clutter and display only the most relevant tools by customizing screens in this manner. Productivity is directly increased by that.
Depending on role rights, OpenEMR allows IT teams to add or remove widgets, sections, and even complete modules. A “context manager” has been suggested by certain community members. By doing this, an administrator might specify which user interface elements are “Clinical” as opposed to “Administrative,” and then enable or deactivate them appropriately.
This kind of role-based customization allows staff to manage an admin-centric view while clinicians see a clear, clinical-focused interface. A more efficient and user-friendly procedure is the end outcome. Every user spends more time on productive tasks and less time sifting through pointless screens.
3. Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Design
Clinicians are increasingly accessing EHR data on tablets during rounds or on smartphones after hours. Making OpenEMR mobile-responsive is critical for usability.
Thankfully, recent OpenEMR versions migrated to a Bootstrap 4/5 front-end, enabling pages to automatically adjust to different screen sizes.
Make sure that forms and tables reflow into single columns on a narrow screen to prevent horizontal scrolling in order to take advantage of this. You should also keep improving layouts for small devices.
Make use of mobile-friendly navigation patterns to maintain one-handed usability. Also, consider enabling only the most-used features on mobile views, hiding complex configuration screens from phone users, for instance.
A responsive, touch-friendly OpenEMR means providers can accomplish tasks on the go without frustration. As a bonus, multi-device access isn’t just about clinician convenience. It also improves patient satisfaction by enabling more timely responses and the use of patient portals on any device.
Related: How to Optimize OpenEMR UI for Multi-Device & Mobile-Friendly Access
4. Simplified Data Entry & Forms
Data entry is a significant part of a clinician’s day, so even small UI tweaks here can yield large efficiency gains. Customize forms to match your workflow.
OpenEMR’s Layout-Based Forms and NationNotes allow the creation of specialty-specific templates.
- To exclude fields that are irrelevant to your practice, use customisation. Include those that do.
- A lot of clinics make their own intake forms, SOAP note templates, or specialty-specific tests.
- This method guarantees that no important item is overlooked while expediting the documentation process.
- Users may become overwhelmed by lengthy forms.
- Divide them up into manageable chunks or phases.
- This becomes even more crucial on mobile devices.
- Data entry becomes less stressful and easier when long forms are broken up into digestible sections with a straightforward progress indicator.
- The experience can also be enhanced by clever UI controls.
- Whenever feasible, substitute dropdowns, radio buttons, and checkboxes with free-text fields.
- These components decrease typos, cut down on typing, and save time.
- Faster charting and clearer data are the outcomes.
Implementing smart defaults and auto-complete can further speed up charting. OpenEMR’s search functionality can be tweaked as well, for instance, expanding the patient search bar to accept more input formats or pressing “Enter” to search, as noted in a recent usability report.
Another recommended improvement is to standardize button placements and labels to make the UI more predictable. Such consistency reduces user confusion and training time.
Overall, by designing forms and workflows around how clinicians naturally work, you let them enter information with fewer clicks and less cognitive effort.
5. Personalized Themes & Visual Settings
UI customization isn’t only about layout and features. It’s also about look and feel. A theme customization system with global or per-user settings is now available in OpenEMR. Clinicians are free to select a visual motif that appeals to them. For instance, some people find that high contrast themes are easier to read, while others use dark mode to lessen eye strain when working evening shifts.
Modest changes, such as altering the text size or color scheme, have a significant effect in lowering visual fatigue. Providing users with authority over these settings also increases their level of happiness. Clinicians feel more in control of the system they utilize daily as a result.
Themes are only one aspect of customization. Practices can customize layouts for various specialties or even individual preferences using OpenEMR. The patient summary may be set up by a mental health clinic to emphasize medication adherence and therapy notes. A pediatric clinic might highlight immunization status and growth charts. Finding the information that is most important to each position is the aim.
Less-used components can be hidden or collapsed to keep the interface clear and simple to browse. Not only does this type of careful customization appear better. It results in quantifiable efficiency gains and more efficient workflows.
Providers waste less time navigating and have a more pleasant experience interacting with the EHR.
Related: Building Patient Portals on Top of OpenEMR: Tech Stack, UX, and Authentication
CapMinds OpenEMR Customization and Integration Service
CapMinds OpenEMR equips clinicians with the best features and ways to integrate. It makes their workflows more efficient and filtered.
The integrated features will allow them to combine the ability of patient record management with conceptual and concurrent reminders.
This enhances the process of decision-making and improves patient care and quality.
- At CapMinds, OpenEMR custom solutions are developed with much care and accuracy to match the special practice needs.
- It will be low-cost and the perfect budget solution for your practice’s long-term future.
- CapMinds OpenEMR prioritizes secure data management & ensures compliance with industry regulations, offering healthcare providers peace of mind.
Get the best technologies and HIPAA-compliant and efficient OpenEMR from CapMinds that can be tailored to fit your practice.
Our OpenEMR services facilitate a Modern User Interface (UI), customization, production support & training. It also facilitates billing, reporting, specialty enhancements, clearing house integrations, e-prescribing, cloud, and more.
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