It is no secret that there is a swarm of health IT in the marketplace, all vying for a larger user base. However, at what point does technology become more of a hindrance than a help? Doctors and nurses who are burdened with clunky or inefficient systems run the risk of becoming less effective instead of more. Joe Condurso, president and CEO of PatientSafe, spoke to Healthcare IT News about a few key factors in designing technology that aligns with the workflows of clinicians.

"In order to get compliance of this technology you need to get those at the point of care, nurses, lab directors," says Condurso, speaking to the aims medical technology needs to adopt to succeed. "They have to really love and embrace the systems and the devices and the workflow." In other words: Make the technology align to the practitioner workflow, not the other way around.

1. Make it smart. Doctors and nurses are busy people. Caring for many patients in a hospital or clinic teeming with people, there is little impetus or desire to learn a new complicated system, or to implement one that doesn't anticipate the needs and actions of those it seeks to benefit. Condurso lays out some must-haves in a good system, describing something that is "built on and can run contextual analytics. It's connected to the back end, connected to all of the policies and procedures [an organization] is trying to implement, but was stuck in a three ring binder." Taking the policies and workflows in place and building a platform that embraces them can help ensure a rapid and effective adoption.

2. Make it available. Taking a page from the aforementioned binder analogy, if a technology is hard to access or it gets in the way, the chances of its being brought in to the fold are low. When technology meant to help serves as a barrier, nobody benefits. The more a system can "to some extent be invisible to the interaction," says Condurso, the better it will integrate in to the workplace. When the technology slips in to the processes already in place it can generate documentation of what is being done so that the clinician doesn't have to. Condurso talks about how correctly designed medical technology can do the heavy lifting, where "all of the processes capture and timestamp all the relevant info that fortifies and creates all of the documentation on the back end." Clinicians want to avoid doing any more documentation than they have to, so when technology both goes with the workflow instead of against it and works to record a narrative, it greatly benefits those in the workplace. This increases productivity and "can be used for the medical legal record, but also for analytics to help learn how to improve.