eHealth - System Usability Improvement : Bridging the Gap Between Stakeholders and Nurses

Abstract Electronic Health (eHealth) denotes the practice of information communication technology within healthcare. In the health care sector, eHealth has received countless criticizing from nurses, who constitute the largest group among healthcare providers. This is because it has had little involvement from nurses and continues to undermine the importance of user participation during planning, designing and maintenance of the system. Although it has been stated that the existing limitations of the system are not entirely technical, eHealth systems are not well designed to support nurses’ working processes. This is due to the cumbersome nature of the system which lead to multiple technical difficulties that are encountered while using them. This thesis therefore presents a general background on the current state of eHealth as well as reviews how the stakeholders such as managers and system administrators identify and handle nurses’ complaints during all stages of eHealth systems developing as well as overall software maintenance. In order to meet the objective, the criteria of data collection was through interviews with project managers and system administrators of the systems. Findings - Lacking communication among the stakeholders i.e project managers and system administrators as well as between the stakeholders and nurses - Lack of involvement of nurses in system development and overall maintenance - Inadequate nurses’ profiling and audience segmentation by project managers and system administrators - Inadequate end user surveying - Poor managerial decision making by nurses’ managers - Lack of proper information technology training for nurses Conclusion Continual contact between stakeholders and nurses, proper information technology training, use of surveying approaches such as pre-deployment usability testing, collection of feedback and interaction design could be some of the essential approach in improving the current system in place. In addition, the use of user centered design which directly involves the end user in information system development would considerably narrow the gap between stakeholders and nurses