Emerging Approaches to Evaluating the Usability of Health Information Systems

Abstract

It is essential that health information systems are easy to use, meet user information needs and are shown to be safe. However, there are currently a wide range of issues and problems with health information systems related to human-computer interaction. Indeed, the lack of ease of use of health information systems has been a major impediment to adoption of such systems. To address these issues, the authors have applied methods emerging from the field of usability engineering in order to improve the adoption of a wide range of health information systems in collaboration with hospitals and other healthcare organizations throughout the world. In this chapter we describe our work in conducting usability analyses that can be used to rapidly evaluate the usability and safety of healthcare information systems, both in artificial laboratory and real clinical settings. We then discuss how this work has evolved towards the development of software systems (“virtual usability laboratories”) capable of remotely collecting, integrating and supporting analysis of a range of usability data.