Usability of electronic patient record systems: Instrument validation study conducted for hospitals in Germany

In Germany and elsewhere, few hospital electronic patient record usability surveys are available. Moreover, there seems to be a complete lack of validated instruments in the respective literature. Hence, this study's purpose is to validate a scale for measuring the usability of hospital electronic patient record systems. The data used for the study's analyses (n = 949) were originally obtained during the German national initiative 'Hospital IT User Questionnaire'. In the course of the study, reliability and exploratory factor analyses were conducted and psychometric tests showed a reliable, valid and suitable instrument. Descriptive data analysis suggests a generally low user perception and variances hint at a high potential for future improvements. To our knowledge, this study shows that a general inventory (subscales from the IsoMetrics inventory) can be applied to measuring hospital electronic patient record usability as well. The validated instrument can be used to inform healthcare providers, decision makers and politicians of a given state of usability, discrepancies between different hospitals or systems providers, and serve as a basis for improvements.