Electronic medical records for prenatal patients: challenges and solutions

A longstanding impediment to successful medical computing is resistance on the part of physicians. Interaction with many medical computing systems is difficult, requiring the physician to spend valuable time and energy trying to figure out how to get the machine to do what needs to be done. In developing encounter forms for use in prenatal medical records, we confronted the challenges involved in designing a computing system that provides an intuitive and physician-friendly method of recording clinical data. In trying to meet those challenges, we also learned about how to evaluate a medical computing system for flexibility and ease of use.