Usability Testing Confirms Partnership’s Copy-and-Paste Safety Recommendations; New Toolkit Released

​Usability testing "overwhelmingly" supports recommendations for safe use of copy and paste in electronic health records (EHRs) made by the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, according to a January 2017 National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) report. The report summarizes testing of recommendations in the Partnership's Toolkit for the Safe Use of Copy and Paste; the Partnership is a multistakeholder collaborative convened by ECRI Institute that includes providers, EHR vendors, and other experts. NIST states that its report adds "empirical evidence and human factors methodology to the safe use of copy and paste emphasized by the Partnership recommendations." Two of the Partnership's four recommendations ("Provide a mechanism to make copy and paste material easily identifiable" and "Ensure that the provenance of copy and paste material is readily available") were overwhelmingly supported by the data from the usability testing, NIST states.