A New Website About Pediatric EMRs, Workflow, Usability, and Productivity

We went live today with EncounterPRO Healthcare Resources’ new website at www.encounterpro.com.

A lot has changed since that last major update of our website in November of 2007.

The federal government has seriously upped the ante with promises of billions of dollars for physicians who demonstrate “meaningful use” (the definition of which is currently being hammered out) of an EMR.
The market has rejected a feature-centric view of EMR performance and is now moving toward a more balanced productivity-oriented user-centric view.
The EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System has many new and exciting features. But, consistent with our long-time philosophy to optimize features and workflow (not maximize features at the expense to workflow), these features have been carefully implemented using EncounterPRO’s unique workflow engine and process definitions to maintain high usability and productivity.
Our new COO, Frank Martin, has instituted a number of educational, rollout, go-live (”Live in Five!”), support, and optional products and service programs. We have leveraged EncounterPRO’s unique workflow system nature to create the EncounterPRO Rollout & G0-Live SYSTEM (which Saves You Substantial Time, Effort, and Money). You can get a sense of both Frank’s philosophy and personality here, here, here, and here.
Our ability to articulate differences between traditional EMRs and EMR workflow systems, the disadvantages of the former and the advantages of the latter, is greatly improved. It’s not just that an increasingly well trafficked blog on EHR Workflow Management Systems is a bully pulpit. It’s that the rise of EMR usability as a hot topic plays to our strength; usability and workflow are two sides of the same coin. Each argument that EncounterPRO has more natural, consistent, relevant, supportive, and flexible workflow can be restated in usability terms.
Finally, in combination with the previous developments, the stars are aligning. For over a decade the EncounterPRO EMR brand has been about the profound relationship between workflow, usability, productivity, and profitability in pediatric and primary care. The market is catching up. Someday *all* EMRs will be based on workflow management and business process management systems technology. The really smart people whose job is to predict the future are starting to realize this. However the pediatrician and primary care physicians have always intuited this; EMR workflow systems are just the formalization of their common sense about what works and what does not.

Our new EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System product website is unusual in an unusually large number of ways: many more words (half as many as a typical nonfiction trade book, which it could conceivably turn into); more extensive but usable navigation structure; larger font, hyperlinks, and buttons; considerable white space; large capitalized regularly-spaced headlines; no pull-down menus; glossary for technical terms; text-relevant illustrations (no uncustomized stock photography); forward and backward hyperlinks; internal page navigation; fat footers; children’s artwork; etc. We had specific design goals regarding educational content, navigability, readability, and indexability (for the search engines) and we adhered to over twenty research-based website usability criteria.

Why did we go to the trouble? There are lots of excellent reasons, some of which I’ll explore in future posts. However the two most important reasons are:

the need to organize a large amount of educational material about pediatric EMR workflow, usability, productivity, and profitability, and
the symbolic significance of creating a high-usability website that is unlike any other EMR product website.

In previous posts (here and here) I discussed the important and complex relationship between educating and marketing. With respect to the second point: if we went to this much trouble to create a high-usability website, one which effectively portrays our unique value proposition, does so efficiently and respectfully of your time, while striving for a memorable pleasant experience, then perhaps our pediatric EMR workflow system is equally effective, efficient, and satisfying to use. Actually it’s much better, since it’s been under continual development and improvement since 1994, and the published public version of our website isn’t even a day old (as of this post).

In fact, if you’d like to find out more, I’ve also added to this blog a form for requesting for product information or demonstrationover the web. If you find either our new product website or my blog thought provoking, I hope you’ll check out the EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System.

Speaking of the fat footer, copying and pasting it to this post is a convenient way for you to understand the structure of, and to browse, our new product website: