From Usability Engineering to Evidence-based Usability in Health IT.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Patient Safety

Background:

• User-Centred Design (UCD) is promoted for health IT usability but is insufficient alone.
• Traditional UCD, while user-focused, doesn't prevent all usability-induced errors.
• Health IT usability is critical for acceptance, safe use, and patient well-being.

Purpose of the Study:

• To highlight the need for empirical evidence to enrich traditional User-Centred Design.
• To identify valuable design principles and common usability mistakes in health IT.
• To determine optimal usability evaluation methods for different contexts.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing evidence-based approaches for health IT design.
• Summarization of attempts to gather evidence on design elements and evaluation methods.
• Description of evidence-based usability design principles for medication alerting systems.

Main Results:

• Traditional User-Centred Design requires augmentation with empirical evidence.
• Evidence is needed on effective design principles and common usability pitfalls.
• Specific evidence-based design principles for medication alerts are presented.

Conclusions:

• Empirical evidence is essential to enhance health IT usability and prevent patient harm.
• A systematic approach to evidence gathering is necessary for design and evaluation.
• Evidence-based principles can improve the safety and effectiveness of health IT systems.