A longitudinal study of usability in health care: does time heal?

We report from a longitudinal laboratory-based usability evaluation of a health care information system. The purpose of the study was to inquire into the nature of usability problems experienced by novice and expert users, and to see to what extend usability problems of a health care information system may or may not disappear over time, as the nurses get more familiar with it-if time heals poor design? As our method for studying this, we conducted a longitudinal study with two key studies. A usability evaluation was conducted with novice users when an electronic patient record system was being deployed in a large hospital. After the nurses had used the system in their daily work for 15 months, we repeated the evaluation. Our results show that time does not heal. Although some problems were not experiences as severe, they still remained after 1 year of extensive use. On the basis of our findings, we discuss implications for evaluating usability in health care.