by Michelle Schneider
Most people I know complain about insufficient cupboard space. It’s a common theme; “My next house will have more storage!” It’s especially true around the holidays when we seem to entertain more frequently and finding that china dish from Aunt Betty seems impossible. When we can’t or it’s buried too deep, we get frustrated and break out the bargain bowl we got at the Black Friday sale and call it a day. This is why we need more storage!
But then, that’s why we want larger monitors. We’ve got all of this cool software and we can never use it to its full potential when we have smaller screens. Most of us have dual monitors by now; some even have triple monitors! Now that’s just gluttony! The bottom line is, the more monitor space I have, the more efficient I become. I love it! That’s been one of my greatest frustrations with MEDITECH in MAGIC and Client/Server. The fixed sizes of the screens made it so that you could view it on a movie screen and the maximize function would only serve to provide a larger gray border around my fixed width MEDITECH screen.
That’s why I was psyched to see that MEDITECH had fixed this problem with their 6.0 release. Finally, a bigger monitor is not wasted. When I hit the maximize button, everything expands. If there are columns, I see more of them. If there are rows, I see more of them. This is really exciting at first. The thing that interrupts my ability to correlate the details is the ever present clicking. Click, click, click. MEDITECH still insists on hard-coding column widths and truncating information that now results in a click, a screen flip, a change in screen style and then another click to return to the other results.
In my previous life, I had a pretty vocal group of physicians that I relied on to give me their opinions, and they were happy to do so. Shocking, I know. But these docs were great because they actually wanted it to work. They wanted to be automated, so their feedback was in the true spirit of process improvement. MEDITECH’s 6.0 has put a brand new face on an age-old problem – click counting. I think those docs will be pleased with the additional details they can see but they will continue to complain about clicks. Most of them are using the latest and greatest technology in their offices and at home and they expect the same in their HIS. They want to hover to see more detail, they want to scroll to see trends and they want columns that autofit to their contents. They want a decision support tool that lets them spend less time clicking and more time caring for patients.
Well, just as MEDITECH upgraded to using the full screen, I did upgrade to more cabinet space. However, I was still removing everything from one shelf on Thanksgiving Day to find the can of green beans I knew was in there! What is Turkey day without green bean casserole, right? Those larger cupboards mean nothing if I don’t use them well. I plan to upgrade to those slide-out shelves to take full advantage of that cupboard space. Otherwise, it’s “All Show and No Go.” Will MEDITECH ever upgrade to the latest technology so their users can really take full advantage of the monitor size and all of the juicy information lurking in the patient record?
1 response so far ↓
1 candidcio at 12/06/09 04:19:29 | Exectweets // Dec 6, 2009 at 4:26 pm
[...] 6 takes advantage of larger monitors: http://focusblog.iatric.com/2009/12/04/all-show-and-no-go/ candidcio – Sun 06 Dec 16:19 0 votes previous next johnmaeda [...]
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