User-centred design of a clinical decision support system for palliative care: Insights from healthcare professionals

OBJECTIVE: Although clinical decision support systems (CDSS) have many benefits for clinical practice, they also have several barriers to their acceptance by professionals. Our objective in this study was to design and validate The Aleph palliative care (PC) CDSS through a user-centred method, considering the predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) core, usability and user experience (UX). METHODS: We performed two rounds of individual evaluation sessions with potential users. Each session included a model evaluation, a task test and a usability and UX assessment. RESULTS: The machine learning (ML) predictive models outperformed the participants in the three predictive tasks. System Usability Scale (SUS) reported 62.7 ± 14.1 and 65 ± 26.2 on a 100-point rating scale for both rounds, respectively, while User Experience Questionnaire – Short Version (UEQ-S) scores were 1.42 and 1.5 on the −3 to 3 scale. CONCLUSIONS: The think-aloud method and including the UX dimension helped us to identify most of the workflow implementation issues. The system has good UX hedonic qualities; participants were interested in the tool and responded positively to it. Performance regarding usability was modest but acceptable.