Health IT, such as clinical decision support (CDS), has the potential to improve patient safety. However, poor usability of health IT continues to be a major concern. Human factors engineering (HFE) approaches are recommended to improve the usability of health IT. The goal of this study from HIP Investigator Dr. Brian Patterson was to identify and describe the usability barriers and facilitators of an HFE-based CDS prior to implementation in the emergency department (ED).
Through debrief interviews with 32 emergency medicine physicians as a part of a scenario-based simulation study evaluating the usability of the HFE-based CDS, the study found 271 occurrences of usability barriers, the majority of which were related to the usability criteria, compatibility (i.e., workflow integration) and shows that workflow integration should be explicitly considered in the design of health IT.
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