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Usability of a novel clinician interface for genetic results.

ABSTRACT: The complexity and rapid growth of genetic data demand investment in information technology to support effective use of this information. Creating infrastructure to communicate genetic information to healthcare providers and enable them to manage that data can positively affect a patient's care in many ways. However, genetic data are complex and present many challenges. We report on the usability of a novel application designed to assist providers in receiving and managing a patient's genetic profile, including ongoing updated interpretations of the genetic variants in those patients. Because these interpretations are constantly evolving, managing them represents a challenge. We conducted usability tests with potential users of this application and reported findings to the application development team, many of which were addressed in subsequent versions. Clinicians were excited about the value this tool provides in pushing out variant updates to providers and overall gave the application high usability ratings, but had some difficulty interpreting elements of the interface. Many issues identified required relatively little development effort to fix suggesting that consistently incorporating this type of analysis in the development process can be highly beneficial. For genetic decision support applications, our findings suggest the importance of designing a system that can deliver the most current knowledge and highlight the significance of new genetic information for clinical care. Our results demonstrate that using a development and design process that is user focused helped optimize the value of this application for personalized medicine.

SUBMITTER: Neri PM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3426649 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Usability of a novel clinician interface for genetic results.

Neri Pamela M PM Pollard Stephanie E SE Volk Lynn A LA Newmark Lisa P LP Varugheese Matthew M Baxter Samantha S Aronson Samuel J SJ Rehm Heidi L HL Bates David W DW

Journal of biomedical informatics 20120412 5

The complexity and rapid growth of genetic data demand investment in information technology to support effective use of this information. Creating infrastructure to communicate genetic information to healthcare providers and enable them to manage that data can positively affect a patient's care in many ways. However, genetic data are complex and present many challenges. We report on the usability of a novel application designed to assist providers in receiving and managing a patient's genetic pr ...[more]

PMID: 22521718

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Project description:BackgroundAudit and Feedback (A&F) is a widely used quality improvement technique that measures clinicians' clinical performance and reports it back to them. Computerised A&F (e-A&F) system interfaces may consist of four key components: (1) Summaries of clinical performance; (2) Patient lists; (3) Patient-level data; (4) Recommended actions. There is a lack of evidence regarding how to best design e-A&F interfaces; establishing such evidence is key to maximising usability, and in turn improving patient safety.AimTo evaluate the usability of a novel theoretically-informed and research-led e-A&F system for primary care (the Performance Improvement plaN GeneratoR: PINGR).Objectives(1) Describe PINGR's design, rationale and theoretical basis; (2) Identify usability issues with PINGR; (3) Understand how these issues may interfere with the cognitive goals of end-users; (4) Translate the issues into recommendations for the user-centred design of e-A&F systems.MethodsEight experienced health system evaluators performed a usability inspection using an innovative hybrid approach consisting of five stages: (1) Development of representative user tasks, Goals, and Actions; (2) Combining Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthrough methods into a single protocol to identify usability issues; (3) Consolidation of issues; (4) Severity rating of consolidated issues; (5) Analysis of issues according to usability heuristics, interface components, and Goal-Action structure.ResultsA final list of 47 issues were categorised into 8 heuristic themes. The most error-prone heuristics were 'Consistency and standards' (13 usability issues; 28% of the total) and 'Match between system and real world' (n=10, 21%). The recommended actions component of the PINGR interface had the most usability issues (n=21, 45%), followed by patient-level data (n=5, 11%), patient lists (n=4, 9%), and summaries of clinical performance (n=4, 9%). The most error-prone Actions across all user Goals were: (1) Patient selection from a list; (2) Data identification from a figure (both population-level and patient-level); (3) Disagreement with a system recommendation.ConclusionsBy contextualising our findings within the wider literature on health information system usability, we provide recommendations for the design of e-A&F system interfaces relating to their four key components, in addition to how they may be integrated within a system.

Dataset Information

Usability of a novel clinician interface for genetic results.

Publications

Usability of a novel clinician interface for genetic results.

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