I’ve been working in healthcare, specifically EMR and practice management for over 20 years. I think the sector is a mess, honestly. It’s too big of a topic for

I’ve been working in healthcare, specifically EMR and practice management for over 20 years. I think the sector is a mess, honestly. It’s too big of a topic for me to get into here. However, there is large amount of variance in how users access and work with medical records, from person to person, role to role, specialty to specialty, hospital type to hospital type, org to org and it gets even worse when users are transitioning from paper. Skeuomorphism might be attractive to non-technical users in transition, but in my experience (this approach isn’t novel) it falls apart very quickly because a) as I previously suggested, there isn’t one model to replicate and skeuomorphic approaches tend to be rigid, and b) users usually very quickly grow out of analog processes as they adapt to software. It’s important to allow practices to customize views for roles and allow users to override so they can put the most important information at their fingertips, and make it quick and easy to jump into the rest of the full details of their record. It’s an information dense problem area, so your fluffy, padded, pretty commerce-focused user patterns are often an anti-pattern. Automation, driven by rules specified by practice and doctors, to help error check their records or point out patient issues (“patient has disease x but we don’t have record that they’ve done y and z preventative measures”, etc.) can help reduce cognitive load and simple mistakes. Dynamic, annotated notation systems driven by templates selected based on the appointment reason and patient history where they do more simply tapping/clicking checkboxes and less typing let doctors focus on interacting with the patient during encounters. Automatically pull in data collected by sensors (weight, blood pressure, whatever) speeds things up, especially for overworked supporting staff. Speed, stability, and consistency over everything. Skeuomorphism really doesn’t help any of that. It was mostly a sales tool like 10-15 years ago.