Healthcare Usability Essay

Nowadays, healthcare industry widely applies health information technologies (IT) in clinical care to cut back method inefficiencies, control growth of costs and improve the quality of care (1). Therefore, different computerized systems, softwares, and websites are designed for clinical decision-making aids, production of new knowledge, enhancing public health information, and raising the standard of health care.

Although, health IT can promote the capability of diagnosis, treatments and have other potential benefits, additionally increases the healthcare complexity (2). This complexity will affect patient safety and quality by increasing the risk of human error (3, 4), and in some cases it may track through design features (2, 5). The

In HCI and computer science, usability usually defines as a relationship between humans and computers and the extent to which it can successfully perform tasks through the interaction of user, system, and task in a distinctive environment (11). Researchers have shown that the usability is one of the foremost appealing factors of these technologies among health care practitioners such as doctors, dentists, nurses (12, 13), other health team members and also people who are using such systems (14). The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines in the standard ISO 9421-11 that “usability is a capability and capacity of a system that allow the user to work with efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction, in a particular environment to achieve specified goals” (15). Several issues can be traced to deficiencies in usability, and HCI designs (7). Therefore, health care community and medical technology industry declared that high level of usability required for new medical devices

These methods assess and enhance the design of clinical software applications (18). One way to come up to the key components of usability is to use heuristic evaluation (13). In the field of HCI, heuristic evaluation is a technique for computer softwares that supports identifying usability problems in the user interface design based on a set of design guidelines, usability principles and heuristics (6). Heuristic evaluations can determine structural problems and root causes of the usability failures and issues; furthermore, it’s a cost-effective method that providing effective insights and feedbacks to designer and developers