A review on usability features for designing electronic health records

Abstract

Health professionals should record clinical care information in order to provide adequate patient assistance. Such recording process requires an Electronic Health Record (EHR) with complete and integral information adjusted to treatments performed on a patient. Moreover, availability and access to EHR are key features supporting decision making and improve patient care. Nevertheless, designing an EHR fulfilling a set of quality attributes is not an easy task. In fact, an EHR with low usability causes deficient clinical services and poor data quality on medical records. In this paper, an interpretation of the ISO 9241-210 standard, in the context of patients' care in an emergency situation, is presented. It considers three mid-level objectives: understanding, designing and evaluating. In this way, an alignment between high-level guidelines, offered by usability standards, and low-level activities to be followed during an EHR design, is achieved.