Summary
Objectives: Employing new health information technologies while concurrently providing quality
patient care and reducing risk is a major challenge in all health care sectors. In
this study, we investigated the usability gaps in the Emergency Department Information
System (EDIS) as ten nurses differentiated by two experience levels, namely six expert
nurses and four novice nurses, completed two lists of nine scenario-based tasks.
Methods: Standard usability tests using video analysis, including four sets of performance
measures, a task completion survey, the system usability scale (SUS), and sub-task
analysis were conducted in order to analyze usability gaps between the two nurse groups.
Results: A varying degree of usability gaps were observed between the expert and novice nurse
groups, as novice nurses completed the tasks both less efficiently, and expressed
less satisfaction with the EDIS. The most interesting finding in this study was the
result of ‘percent task success rate,’ the clearest performance measure, with no substantial
difference observed between the two nurse groups. Geometric mean values between expert
and novice nurse groups for this measure were 60% vs. 62% in scenario 1 and 66% vs.
55% in scenario 2 respectively, while there were some marginal to substantial gaps
observed in other performance measures. In addition to performance measures and the
SUS, sub-task analysis highlighted navigation pattern differences between users, regardless
of experience level.
Conclusion: This study will serve as a baseline study for a future comparative usability evaluation
of EDIS in other institutions with similar clinical settings.
Keywords
Electronic health records - emergency department information system - EDIS - usability
engineering
