A Simple Electronic Medical Record System Designed for Research

With extensive deployment of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, EMR usability remains a major source of frustration to clinicians. There is a significant need for a simple EMR software package that will enable investigators to study design and usability in a laboratory setting. We developed an open-source software package that implements the display functions of an EMR system. The user interface emphasizes the temporal display of data such as vital signs, medication administrations, and laboratory test results. It is well suited to support research about clinician information-seeking behaviors and adaptive user interfaces in terms of measures that include task accuracy, time to completion, and cognitive load. The Simple EMR System is freely available to the research community on GitHub.