Usability Evaluation System Design

Introduction

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, software, 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

The expert-based inspection will uncover potential usability problems faster with presumptively lesser cost than user-based tests by involving a usability or HCI expert to conduct a usability assessment or walk-through of the system (15).

Expert-based methods include usability inspection methods such as heuristic evaluation and cognitive walk-through (16). These methods assess and enhance the design of clinical software applications (17). One way to come up to the key components of usability is to use heuristic evaluation (12). In the field of HCI, heuristic evaluation is a technique for computer software 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 designers and developers (12). Many studies have shown that heuristic evaluation can predict major usability issues that might potentially occur throughout the usability tests (18,

Its twenty five affiliated hospitals and health care centers have implemented a HIS, named Iranian Hospital Information System (IHIS) since 2002.

To our knowledge, so far, there is little published data on the usability of pharmacy systems and no usability study has been done on the UI of PIS integrated into IHIS. Furthermore, in a study about the heuristic evaluation of the LIS and RIS subsystems and emergency information system of IHIS 116 and 163 unique problems were identified respectively, which was suggested the usability evaluation of other IHIS subsystems (25, 26). The purpose of this study was to investigate PIS subsystem in the IHIS using Nielsen’s heuristics to identify and classify the usability