There's a myriad of other ones as well, they all have similar UIs, with the primary goals being to never hide any important info from the user, and to let the user take important actions quickly. That naturally leads to high density. Nevertheless it needs to be reasonably intuitive, since doctors and nurses tend to not be very tech-savvy, which leads to some interesting design constraints.
I worked as an EMR consultant for a few years, helping teach medical staff to use these things. The thing that struck me was that while some of the UIs look "outdated" by web standards, the software often did a great of taking medical staff through their daily workflows. I feel like a lot of websites do the opposite - they look nice, but using them is a pain.
(Conversely, most staff hated new EMRs, because it enforced doing things the hospital wants its staff to do for liability and billing, but the staff doesn't want to do - for example, asking Maternity nurses to talk to new mothers about smoking cessation.)
My mom builds EMR workflows for a major hospital and my father and sister are doctors (both very tech savvy--my sister has a computational bio background for her Bachelor's prior to her MD).
None of them have anything good to say about Epic.
They are infamous for being trash and difficult to use though. There's an entire field of "EMR consultants". It's also why there's a EMR startup on hacker news every other week.
The outcome can vary wildly, even in the same EMR software, depending on the implementing team. I worked a place where it was the implementation team's first time, but they listened heavily to requests from different departments. The most common request was to reduce the number of different views and screens, compared to the old custom software that was being replaced. Resizable fonts without having to change screen resolutions was another one.Staff also wanted to keep the rest as much the same as possible, but add a few little things here and there..
The new EMR software was highly configurable, so lots of this happened. Staff teams signed off on it, and had training from the implementation team.
Fewer screens? Check! …Wellll, sorta: some very long scrolling views…which didn't play nice with mousewheels. It would seem like the page randomly and mysteriously stoppe scrolling, then suddenly scroll normally. There were lots of weird data entry errors, from all staff, regardless of prior reputation for accuracy. They were just getting used to new software, right? Nope. I tracked this down to the dropdown lists scattered on the long scrolling pages. As a page scrolled, random lists ate scroll events, changed the list item to either the first or last item, then permitted scrolling to continue.
Fonts worked mostly great…except some of the typefaces follow the should-be-criminal design of allowing various characters to to look identical. Font sizing worked as expected. I think Pre-cert desk liked Candara, for the way numbers stood out.
Notes fields…these were our downfall, sometimes multiple times per day. Anything put into them was inserted as raw text into SQL:
Patient said xxxxxxx -- ESR
…or…
something-something 'quoted thing'
…would mean the database locked up, no exams savable or queryable, no patient intake, no checkout until I.T. admin could fix it. The implementation team was gone, and non-responsive, so sticky notes with a list of forbidden characters seemed to be everywhere.
I believe some contracts for referrals were lost, due to delays and errors. Some staff quit, after months of no fixes. But I later heard from one of the most affected staffers that the same EMR software was installed at our biggest competitor, and no issues at all.
There's a myriad of other ones as well, they all have similar UIs, with the primary goals being to never hide any important info from the user, and to let the user take important actions quickly. That naturally leads to high density. Nevertheless it needs to be reasonably intuitive, since doctors and nurses tend to not be very tech-savvy, which leads to some interesting design constraints.