Usability Evaluation of an Admission, Discharge, and Transfer Information System: A Heuristic Evaluation

BACKGROUND: Admission, discharge and, transfer (ADT) process is one of the most important hospital workflows. ADT system is a part of a hospital information system (HIS). AIM: The objective of this study was to evaluate the usability of the ADT system. METHODS: The study performed at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (MUMS) hospitals. Data collection instrument was a validated checklist of Pierotti heuristic evaluation. To determine the severity of usability problems, a hybrid of Nielson and Tampere unit for computer-human interaction (TAUCHI) severity scaling algorithm was used. Usability problems were divided into five categories (major, severe, minor, cosmetic, and technical). Six experts evaluated the ADT system independently. According to TAUCHI severity scale, if a feature has not yet been implemented in the ADT system, evaluators considered it a technical usability problem. Therefore, usability problems due to non-design feature in the ADT system were identified. Finally, the mean severity of each usability problems was calculated. RESULTS: A total of 186 usability problems were identified. The frequency of major, sever, minor and cosmetic usability problems were 2, 65, 69 and 50, respectively. A total of 55 usability problems by the evaluators were recognised as technical problems. The highest mismatch with usability principles was related to the “recognition rather than recall”. The range of the mean severity of usability problems was between 0-2.31. CONCLUSIONS: Our result showed that although implementation of IHIS on a large scale, it still suffered from unresolved usability problems. Identification of usability problems and evaluation of their level of severity, which was simultaneously performed in this study, can be used as a guide to evaluate the usability of other HISs.