Summative Usability Tests of Electronic Health Records (2016)
Motivation
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) called for improved usability and safety and improved risk management during the development of healthcare related IT products as part of its 2015 Edition Health IT Certification Program, also called Meaningful Use 3 (MU3) certification program. Known as Safety-Enhanced Design, the new guidelines stipulated that formative and summative user-centered design activities must take place during design and development of IT products as a prerequisite for certification and inclusion on ONC's Certified Health IT Product list (CHPL) and that the results of the usability studies be made available online to the public.
Process
An ONC-Authorized Certification Body contracted User-View to perform the summative usability tests on the electronic health record technologies of multiple vendors as part of the MU3 certification process.
- Five hundred seventy-six (576) participants took part in the testing of twelve (12) EHRs
- Participants included physicians, nurses, registration specialists, and configuration specialists
- Products tested included ambulatory, acute, and module EHRs
- Test scenarios included multiple subtasks
Outcome
User-View compiled the results of the summative usability tests and published them to the ONC CHPL website as required. User-View was among the first approved testing entities to publish the results of summative testing as required by the new MU3 Safety Enhanced Design Guidelines. Along with the other User-View team members, I co-authored a summary paper describing our findings during the MU3 certification process for EHRs. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care. Click here for pdf.
