The Importance of Usability in Clinical Informatics

Beschreibung

The usability of health information technology and systems has remained a major issue and there continue to be reports of clinical information systems that have failed to take into account human factors. These factors need to be considered in making systems easy to use and effective for health professionals as well as for patients and lay people. This presentation will discuss approaches to ensuring the usability of clinical information systems, and how this can be measured, assessed and improved. We will also examine some of the issues with current health IT solutions and how lessons learned from the success of mobile and emergent applications can be applied. Criteria for designing and evaluating the usability of clinical systems will be described, along with an effective, simple and practical approach known as low-cost rapid usability testing, several usability inspection methods as well as clinical simulations. These methods can be applied throughout the design and evaluation of a wide range of applications ranging from electronic health records to mobile apps and examples will be provided of using the approach in both research and practice.