Incorporating the End User’s Experience in Healthcare IT Carol Bradley, Disability Access/504 Officer

Sutter Health Sutter Health is a large non-profit health system operating primarily throughout Northern California Sutter Health includes large and small hospitals, clinics, physician networks, and unique programs like Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly, a home care/hospice program, and an Advanced Illness Management program 2

The Importance IT has the potential to be barrier free— allowing access for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability Like physical accessibility, it must be built to do this 3

The Importance Accessible web or mobile content is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability Technological solutions have the potential to be a cost-effective method of providing patient-centered care allowing patients to actively participate in care 4

Challenges This is a frontier--particularly in the mobile environment! We choose § 508 to begin our process—we now use WCAG 2.0 as our standard Our team is very well trained on the standards and follow these standards very carefully 5

Challenges HOWEVER—we have found there are still issues not identified by the standards We research and utilize solutions identified as the most accessible options and find in some cases there is no existing solution 6

Challenges Complex! We do on-going testing of all content Without clear standards that both entities and vendors can look to –the dialogue is time consuming 7

Challenges Web content has been pretty standard Mobile has required a lot more research & innovation from our vendors 8

Challenges Much content in health care IT is vendor- driven content that is branded as our content It interfaces with our system 9

Challenges Many mobile vendors don’t offer products with accessibility and don’t understand accessibility! Our team spends much time communicating with vendors about accessibility features that our system expects 10

Some Examples 11