Abstract
Health information technology (HIT) is a key component of healthcare today and has the potential to help support the quadruple aim of patient-centered healthcare. The access, delivery, and receipt of healthcare involves many stakeholders interacting with different HIT, and the usability of HIT is known to impact the acceptance and adoption of HIT, as well as health outcomes of populations. Understanding the influence that various individual and contextual factors have on the usability of HIT is challenging because of the network of interactions between humans and technology that occur in the same or different contexts within a unique healthcare system. Yet, it is important to identify usability problems in order to be able to design and implement HIT. This article begins by describing the current use of HIT with respect to the healthcare landscape. Next, usability is defined and demonstrated to play a critical role in users’ acceptance and adoption of HIT. The remainder of the article describes a new framework called, healthcare experience design. The healthcare experience design framework models the healthcare experience, which is defined as the composite of all of an individual’s interactions with other humans and HIT. The healthcare experience design framework is a useful conceptual model and methodological approach to identify usability problems in the healthcare system, and its practical application is illustrated using an artificial use case.
Highlights
Health information technology (HIT) is a critical component of healthcare today
Because usability problems can erupt from a user’s interaction with a poorly designed HIT to the same degree that an individual’s cognitive capabilities and context of use can impact their ability to meaningfully interact with a HIT to achieve positive health outcomes, the healthcare experience design framework can be used as a conceptual model to be able to identify these components of the healthcare experience
Healthcare experience design can be used as a conceptual model and affords designers and health information providers a useful visualization of the healthcare experience in order to approach designing HIT to be used by target audiences in efficacious and safe ways
Summary
Health information technology (HIT) is a critical component of healthcare today. HIT is used to deliver healthcare to patients in remote locations through telemedicine (Bashshur, 1995) and support health-related activities, such as home monitoring of patients and patient self-care (Whitten, 2006). There are the patients to consider and their perspectives; there are the physicians to consider and their perspectives; there are caregivers to consider and their perspectives; and there are the numerous interactions with each other and multiple touchpoints with technology, often with disparate systems, that impact usability Collectively, these components bricolage the healthcare experience. There is a need for a broader understanding of how to design HIT usability studies, perform usability testing, and design HIT that mitigate disparities in healthcare and health outcomes rather than augment This exploration of the healthcare experience can be conceptualized by a novel framework, termed, healthcare experience design. Given the depth and breadth in which HIT is employed and consumed in the healthcare system and in the management of one’s health, a model that depicts these unique healthcare scenarios needs to account for all stakeholders, technology, and activities that occur in the access, delivery, and receipt of healthcare. An artificial use case scenario will be used to demonstrate how healthcare experience design can be applied in the study of the usability of a telemedicine platform
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