computer-based counseling systems in health care play an important role in the toolset available for medical doctors to inform, motivate and challenge their patients according to a well-defined therapeutic goal. The d...
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computer-based counseling systems in health care play an important role in the toolset available for medical doctors to inform, motivate and challenge their patients according to a well-defined therapeutic goal. The design, development and implementation of such systems require close collaboration between users, i.e. patients, and developers. While this is true of any software development process, it can be particularly challenging in the health counseling field, where there are multiple specialties and extremely heterogeneous user groups. In order to facilitate a structured design approach for counseling systems in health care, we developed (a) an iterative three-staged specification process, which enables early involvement of potential users in the development process, and (b) a specification language, which enables an author to consistently describe and define userinterfaces and interaction designs in a step-wise manner. Due to the formal nature of our specifications, our implementation has some unique features, like early execution of prototypes, automated system generation and verification capabilities. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Objective: Numerous usability questionnaires are available to evaluate the usability of health information technology (IT). It can be difficult for practitioners to determine which questionnaire most closely aligns wi...
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Objective: Numerous usability questionnaires are available to evaluate the usability of health information technology (IT). It can be difficult for practitioners to determine which questionnaire most closely aligns with their health IT evaluation goals. Our objective was to develop a practical guide to enable practitioners to select an appropriate usability questionnaire for their health IT evaluation. Methods: Questionnaires were identified from the literature and input from usability experts. Inclusion criteria included: 1) post-test or post-task usability questionnaire;2) demonstrated validity, with good internal reliability (Cronbach alpha >= 0.70);3) freely available for use;4) applicable across a wide range of health IT products;and 5) demonstrated use with health IT in peer-reviewed literature, even if not originally designed for healthcare. Results: Criteria were met by seven usability questionnaires. Results include a synopsis of each usability questionnaire along with a matrix to visually compare methodological characteristics across questionnaires. Additionally, results include an analysis of distinguishing methodological strengths and limitations that set each usability questionnaire apart. For each questionnaire, we also outline considerations for use when evaluating health IT. Conclusion: This novel, practical guide provides an important methodological analysis of currently available usability questionnaires for health IT evaluation. This article can help practitioners make a more efficient, but also well-informed, choice when selecting a usability questionnaire for health IT evaluation. This practical, methodological guide applies to a wide range of health IT products, including electronic health records (EHRs).
Background: Although electronic health record nursing summaries aim to provide a concise overview of patient data, they often fall short of meeting nurses' information needs, leading to underutilization. This gap ...
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Background: Although electronic health record nursing summaries aim to provide a concise overview of patient data, they often fall short of meeting nurses' information needs, leading to underutilization. This gap arises from a lack of involvement of nurses in the design of health information technologies. Objective: The purpose of this exploratory co-design case study was to solicit insights from nurses regarding nursing summary design considerations, including key information types and the preferred design prototype. Methods: We recruited clinical nurses (N=33) from 7 inpatient units at a university hospital in the Midwestern United States using a purposive sampling method. We used images from a simulated nursing summary to generate visual card versions of the 46 information types currently included in an electronic health record vendor-generated nursing summary. Participants selected which cards to include and arranged them in their designs based on their perceived relevance of the information types to the summary and their preferred reading layout. The nurses' perceived relevance of information types to the summary was analyzed by quantifying the frequency of included cards, while the nurses' preferred reading layout was analyzed by quantifying the occurrence of closely paired cards to identify common groupings. After participants evaluated the information type cards, debriefing interviews were conducted and analyzed thematically to explore their rationales for the desired content and its arrangement. Results: The participants demonstrated a high level of engagement in the activities. On average, all 33 participants included 61% (n=28) of the total information types (n=46). The most frequently included cards were "unit specimen" (results of the analysis of body fluid, tissue, or urine), "activity," "diet," and "hospital problems," each included by 33 participants. Participants most frequently preferred adjacency of the following pairs: "activity" and "diet" (pair
Background: Health information exchange (HIE), the electronic sharing of medical records between health care institutions, may increase patient safety. However, reported barriers to clinicians' use of HIE include ...
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Background: Health information exchange (HIE), the electronic sharing of medical records between health care institutions, may increase patient safety. However, reported barriers to clinicians' use of HIE include poor system usability and information quality. Through simulated medication reconciliation tasks, our objective was to characterize clinicians' user experience with HIE technologies, and to identify requirements for future HIE technologies from clinicians' current use patterns. Methods: Our simulation-based observational study included three successive generations of HIE technologies used in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system: computerized Patient Record System (CPRS);VistA Web;and Joint Longitudinal Viewer (JLV). While using a think-aloud technique, participants attempted two randomly assigned, time-limited medication reconciliation tasks using any of these technologies. Tasks followed from clinical scenarios that varied on the types of cues about HIE data availability. After tasks, participants used the UMUX-Lite instrument to rate each technology's ease of use and utility (each range 1-7;7=strongly agree). To identify design-related barriers, we coded and interpreted usability and content problems that participants encountered. To ease coding, we used problem frequency to indicate severity. Results: Forty-four clinicians, spanning 21 specialties, participated from four VA medical centers: 23 physicians, 11 nurse practitioners, and 10 pharmacists. Overall, participant-rated ease of use and utility (M [SD]) were 4.0 (1.7)-a point-estimate grade of D ("Fair")-and 4.0 (1.6), respectively. Participants spent 71 % of task time in CPRS, which also ranked highest in ease of use and utility (ps < .001). Across technologies, frequent user-experience problems included unclear screen layout (35 [80 % of] participants), difficult navigation (35 [80 %]), and task-irrelevant data (34 [77 %]). Notable features included preformatted reports;t
The Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) developed a semianalytical solution for slug tests that incorporates the effects of partial penetration, anisotropy, and the presence of variable conductivity well skins. The solutio...
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The Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) developed a semianalytical solution for slug tests that incorporates the effects of partial penetration, anisotropy, and the presence of variable conductivity well skins. The solution can simulate either confined or unconfined conditions. The original model, written in FORTRAN, has a text-based interface with rigid input requirements and limited output options. We re-created the main routine for the KGS model as a Visual Basic macro that runs in most versions of Microsoft Excel and built a simple-to-use Excel spreadsheet interface that automatically displays the graphical results of the test. A comparison of the output from the original FORTRAN code to that of the new Excel spreadsheet version for three cases produced identical results.
Lack of good userinterfaces has been a major impediment to the acceptance and routine use of health-care professional workstations. Health-care providers, and the environment in which they practice, place strenuous d...
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Lack of good userinterfaces has been a major impediment to the acceptance and routine use of health-care professional workstations. Health-care providers, and the environment in which they practice, place strenuous demands on the interface. userinterfaces must be designed with greater consideration of the requirements, cognitive capabilities, and limitations of the end-user. The challenge of pining better acceptance and achieving widespread use of clinical information systems will be accentuated as the variety and complexity of multi-media presentation increases. Better understanding of issues related to cognitive processes involved in human-computer interactions is needed in order to design interfaces that are more intuitive and more acceptable to health-care professionals. Critical areas which deserve immediate attention include: improvement of pen-based technology, development of knowledge-based techniques that support contextual presentation, and development of new strategies and metrics to evaluate userinterfaces. Only with deliberate attention to the userinterface, can we improve the ways in which information technology contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of health-care providers.
A Windows program for metabolic engineering analysis and experimental design has been developed. A graphical userinterface enables the pictorial, "on-screen" construction of a metabolic network. Once a mode...
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A Windows program for metabolic engineering analysis and experimental design has been developed. A graphical userinterface enables the pictorial, "on-screen" construction of a metabolic network. Once a model is composed, balance equations are automatically generated. Model construction, modification and information exchange between different users is thus considerably simplified. For a given model, the program can then be used to predict all the extreme point flux distributions that optimize an objective function while satisfying balances and constraints by using a depth-first search strategy. One can also find the minimum reaction set that satisfies different conditions. Based on the identified flux distributions or linear combinations, the user can simulate the NMR and GC/MS spectra of selected signal molecules. Alternately, spectra vectorization allows for the automated optimization of labeling experiments that are intended to distinguish between different, yet plausible flux extreme point distributions. The example provided entails predicting the flux distributions associated with deleting pyruvate kinase and designing C-13 NMR experiments that can maximally discriminate between the flux distributions. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
Design: Jemboss is a graphical userinterface (GUI) for the European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS). It is being developed at the MRC UK HGMP-RC as part of the EMBOSS project. This paper explains the t...
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Design: Jemboss is a graphical userinterface (GUI) for the European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS). It is being developed at the MRC UK HGMP-RC as part of the EMBOSS project. This paper explains the technical aspects of the Jemboss client-server design. The client-server model optionally allows that a Jemboss user have an account on the remote server. The Jemboss client is written in Java and is downloaded automatically to a user's workstation via Java Web Start using the HTML protocol. The client then communicates with the remote server using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). A Tomcat server listens on the remote machine and communicates the SOAP requests to a Jemboss server, again written in Java. This Java server interprets the client requests and executes them through Java Native interface (JNI) code written in the C language. Another C program having setuid privilege, jembossctl, is called by the JNI code to perform the client requests under the user's account on the server. The commands include execution of EMBOSS applications, file management and project management tasks. Jemboss allows the use of JSSE for encryption of communication between the client and server. The GUI parses the EMBOSS Ajax Command Definition language for form generation and maximum input flexibility. Jemboss interacts directly with the EMBOSS libraries to allow dynamic generation of application default settings. Results: This interface is part of the EMBOSS distribution and has attracted much interest. It has been set up at many other sites globally as well as being used at the HGMP-RC for registered users.
Background. It is a known fact that there is a conflict between what users expect and what userinterface designers create in the field of medical informatics along with other fields of interface design. Objectives. T...
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Background. It is a known fact that there is a conflict between what users expect and what userinterface designers create in the field of medical informatics along with other fields of interface design. Objectives. The objective of the study is to suggest, from the 'design art' perspective, a method for improving the usability of an electronic medical record (EMR) interface. The suggestion is based on the hypothesis that the userinterface of an EMR should be iconographic. Method. The proposed three-step method consists of a questionnaire survey on how hospital users perceive concepts/terms that are going to be used in the EMR userinterface. Then icons associated with the terms are designed by a designer, following a guideline which is prepared according to the results of the first questionnaire. Finally the icons are asked back to the target group for proof. A case study was conducted with 64 medical staff and 30 professional designers for the first questionnaire, and with 30 medical staff for the second. Results. In the second questionnaire 7.53 icons out of 10 were matched correctly with a standard deviation of 0.98. Also, all icons except three were matched correctly in at least 83.3% of the forms. Conclusion. The proposed new method differs from the majority of previous studies which are based on user requirements by leaning on user experiments instead. The study demonstrated that the userinterface of EMRs should be designed according to a guideline that results from a survey on users' experiences on metaphoric perception of the terms.
Objective The primary objective was to evaluate time, number of interface actions, and accuracy on medication reconciliation tasks using a novel userinterface (Twinlist, which lays out the medications in five columns...
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Objective The primary objective was to evaluate time, number of interface actions, and accuracy on medication reconciliation tasks using a novel userinterface (Twinlist, which lays out the medications in five columns based on similarity and uses animation to introduce the grouping - ***/hcil/sharp/twinlist) compared to a Control interface (where medications are presented side by side in two columns). A secondary objective was to assess participant agreement with statements regarding clarity and utility and to elicit comparisons. Material and Methods A 1 x 2 within-subjects experimental design was used with interface (Twinlist or Control) as an independent variable;time, number of clicks, scrolls, and errors were used as dependent variables. Participants were practicing medical providers with experience performing medication reconciliation but no experience with Twinlist. They reconciled two cases in each interface (in a counterbalanced order), then provided feedback on the design of the interface. Results Twenty medical providers participated in the study for a total of 80 trials. The trials using Twinlist were statistically significantly faster (18%), with fewer clicks (40%) and scrolls (60%). Serious errors were noted 12 and 31 times in Twinlist and Control trials, respectively. Discussion Trials using Twinlist were faster and more accurate. Subjectively, participants rated Twinlist more favorably than Control. They valued the novel layout of the drugs, but indicated that the included animation would be valuable for novices, but not necessarily for advanced users. Additional feedback from participants provides guidance for further development and clinical implementations. Conclusions Cognitive support of medication reconciliation through interface design can significantly improve performance and safety.
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