User Testing of an Admission, Discharge, Transfer System: Usability Evaluation

Majid Jangi,Reza Khajouei,Sara Zangouei,Mohammad Reza Mazaheri Habibi ,Mahmoud Tara ,Azade Kamel Ghalibaf ,Sayyed Mostafa Mostafavi

doi:10.30699/fhi.v10i1.282

Abstract

Introduction: To improve the first step of the hospitalization procedure, appropriate interaction must be established between users and the admission, discharge, and transfer system. The aim of this study was to evaluate the usability of the ADT system in some of selected Iranian non-teaching hospitals.Material and Methods: This study was cross-sectional research that has evaluated the usability of a selected ADT system using the think-aloud method by 11 medical record administrators. Users were asked to follow the provided scenario, then share and elaborate on what they saw, thought about, did, felt, and decided during their interaction with the system. Users' feedbacks were collected and organized into four main categories for further processing.Results: To evaluate the usability of an ADT system, four routine scenario tasks were followed by users and only 45.45% of them could implement all tasks. Overall, 36 independent problems were identified. All problems were related to the data entry categories that accounted for the largest share. The most important problems were related to the issues regarding "date of birth" field in this category which deals with the outpatient admission process.Conclusion: The study of the usability testing method indicated that the ADT subsystem of non-teaching hospital has many problems in interact with real users with the system. It showed that more than half of the users could not completely and successfully perform the entire real-world scenario tasks. Furthermore, the most usability problems were found in data entry categories.

Highlights

To improve the first step of the hospitalization procedure, appropriate interaction must be established between users and the admission, discharge, and transfer system
To evaluate the usability of an ADT system, four routine scenario tasks were followed by users and only 45.45% of them could implement all tasks
The most important problems were related to the issues regarding "date of birth" field in this category which deals with the outpatient admission process

Summary

Introduction

To improve the first step of the hospitalization procedure, appropriate interaction must be established between users and the admission, discharge, and transfer system. To be performed correctly for the inpatient admission process, appropriate interaction must be established between the system and reception staff users of the ADT system. Regarding the enormous impacts of usability of information systems on user satisfaction and user-system interaction, evaluation results can be useful in the improvement of design or redesign of the system interface [6]. Some factors as the time required completing a task, task completion rate, and number and types of errors are measured [8] Based on this approach, several recommended methods such as think-aloud assessment have been introduced as the gold standard for usability studies [10]

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Conclusion