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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: January 24, 2003 Bar Code Tech Drives Nurses Nuts (Wired) -- "Nurses quickly learned how to hack the system to save time. For example, if a patient's bar code didn't scan correctly on the first try, nurses often entered the seven-digit bar code number manually rather than rescanning it." (Comments: Thanks Bernard Chen.)
Reader Comments...
The Veteran's Health Administration implemented a bar-code system to improve the timing and dosage of medication, but they completely missed the human angle in the implementation. The nurses don't like it and their response is, "...proper training and system upgrades could solve the problems revealed in the VA study." Blaming UI design errors and, at a higher level, product design errors on training is so easy to do, what will it take for the usability/HCI community to teach people not to think that way? The problem with the VA system isn't the complexity of the bar code machine, it's the processes surrounding its use. Someone needs to go in and change some of the validation parameters so the system isn't enforcing it's own behavioral preferences on the users.
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