Usability evaluation of electronic health record

Electronic Health Records (EHR) is a core part of a hospital information system, as well as a service on duty of the patient to improve the treatment of patients. It can be considered as a longitudinal electronic record of patient heath information, for example vital signs, medical history or laboratory data, generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting. Although the great advantages that an EHR system provides to an hospital, its adoption is slow to date due to a fundamental failure on the usability and the associated costs. This paper intends to present a usability evaluation to the EHR of a Portuguese hospital. It discusses how an inspection usability method, Heuristic Walkthrough, was used to evaluate and improve the usability of the EHR system. Outcomes from the evaluation resulted in understanding what can be improved to achieve a better system. Understand the level of usability presented by the EHR was other of the main objectives.This work is financed with the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), with the grant SFRH/BD/70549/2010 and within project PEstOE/EEI/UI0752/2011