A Web-Based System for Infectious Disease Data Integration and Sharing: Evaluating Outcome, Task Performance Efficiency, User Information Satisfaction, and Usability

To better support the surveillance of infectious disease and epidemic outbreaks by public health professionals, we design and implement BioPortal, an advanced Web-based system for cross-jurisdictional information sharing and integration. In this paper, we report two empirical studies that evaluate the outcomes, task performance efficiency, user information satisfaction, and usability associated with BioPortal. Overall, our results suggest that the use of BioPortal can improve users’ surveillance performance as measured by analysis accuracy and efficiency (i.e., the amount of time required to complete an analysis task). Our subjects were highly satisfied with the information support of BioPortal and considered it reasonably usable. Our evaluation findings show the effectiveness and value of BioPortal and, at the same time, shed light on several areas where its design can further improve.