Applying HCI Principles in Designing Usable Systems for Dentistry

Dentistry and medicine both demand that their practice teams perform technical procedures in dynamic environments, and both have been thrust in to the electronic world after centuries of relying upon paper documentation and communication. Unlike medicine, though, dentistry’s ability to document and communicate has been hampered by the lack of an adequate and available diagnostic terminology. While the International Classification of Disease (ICD) has long been part and parcel of medical practice, dentists have only had access to standardized terms to describe procedures. This documentation gap has been thrown into stark relief in the era of electronic health records, in which structured data is most directly useful for secondary analysis. In this chapter, we describe an application of HCI principles to our effort to bring a newly developed dental diagnostic terminology into dental clinics through implementation in a dental EHR. Because we had an adequate budget, time, and access to a broad spectrum of committed stakeholders, including the EHR vendor, practicing dentists, epidemiologist, informaticians, we were able to follow an iterative participatory design approach to refine both the terminology and the interface to the terminology. A leaner approach, such as heuristic evaluation alone, would have been more appropriate had we not had access to such a wealth of resources, though such scaling-back would, of course, have impacted our ability to identify and address usability challenges. This highly collaborative work was undertaken in an effort to enhance the profession of dentistry by narrowing the gap between what is useful to secondary users of data and what is usable from the perspective of primary users.