How Are You Evaluating Your HIE User Experience?

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) routinely assert that they understand what their users want, what they need, and how well their systems are performing. When pressed on how they know this, the most common answer is simple: help desk data.

Help desk calls are useful, but they are an incomplete and often misleading proxy for true user experience, satisfaction, and perceived value. They capture only the issues severe enough, and the users are motivated enough to stop their work and ask for help. They do not reflect the broader clinical, operational, and community experience with an HIE, nor do they account for how perceptions influence adoption, utilization, and future customers.

Start With Humility

An essential first step in evaluating user experience is humility. Can you accept the possibility that your tool is not amazing for everyone who is expected to use it?

If you find yourself thinking, “Our product is so strong that more organizations should want it,” that is often the clearest signal that it is time to look more closely. The value you believe you are delivering may not be reaching users at all levels or may be getting lost entirely in workflow friction, training gaps, or data limitations.

Board members and executive champions may be satisfied, but they are rarely the people relying on the HIE in real time.

Go Beyond Leadership and IT Perspectives

The true test of HIE value happens in practice, with the people doing the work every day:

• Health information managers

• Nurses and medical assistants

• Physicians and advanced practice providers

• First responders

• Public health registrars

• Medicaid case managers and social service staff

Have you actually watched these users interact with your system? Have you asked them what information they expect to find—and what they consistently cannot? Do you understand where gaps exist in data availability, training, trust, or awareness?

Without this level of insight, it is easy to confuse access with usability and availability with value.

Observe Reality, Not Assumptions

Focus groups and onsite workflow observations can be extraordinarily revealing, particularly when conducted by an independent third party. External facilitators often create a safer environment for candid feedback, free from concern about offending leadership or jeopardizing relationships.

In practice, the reality uncovered in these sessions is frequently very different from what HIE leadership expects. Users may describe workarounds, avoidance behaviors, or parallel systems that never surface through formal support channels.

The Power of Rounding

During implementations and go-lives, one of the most effective ways to identify gaps in training, usability, and system performance is simple rounding, being physically present with users where care and services are delivered.

Frontline users are not going to call a help desk while caring for patients or managing time-sensitive cases. They are also understandably frustrated by IT staff who do not understand their workflows. If users cannot get what they need immediately, they will either abandon the tool or create workarounds. Those workarounds spread quickly as peers train one another on the job, often becoming entrenched and difficult to undo.

By the time these issues reach leadership awareness, they are no longer isolated problems; they are cultural norms.

Why This Matters

A realistic understanding of user experience delivers tangible benefits:

• Better products and optimization through insight into real-world use

• Higher adoption and sustained utilization driven by relevance and trust

• Stronger organizational growth as value becomes visible at the grassroots level

• Organic awareness and promotion when users advocate for tools that genuinely help them do their jobs

Practical Tips for HIE Leaders

• Conduct open training and feedback sessions on a regular cadence. Ensure these sessions are communicated broadly and reach diverse user roles, not just leadership or IT teams.

• Be open to hearing that your “baby is ugly.” The philosophy of “build it and they will come” is not sustainable in today’s healthcare environment.

• Go where the work is happening. Observe workflows directly, map work and data flows, and validate assumptions against lived experience.

Evaluating HIE user experience is not a one-time activity or a metric buried in a dashboard. It is an ongoing commitment to listening, observing, and adapting, grounded in the realities of the people you serve.