Healthcare experience design: A conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the effects of usability on the access, delivery, and receipt of healthcare

Abstract

Health information technology (HIT) is a key component of healthcare today and has the potential to help support the quadruple aim of patient-centered healthcare. The access, delivery, and receipt of healthcare involves many stakeholders interacting with different HIT, and the usability of HIT is known to impact the acceptance and adoption of HIT, as well as health outcomes of populations. Understanding the influence that various individual and contextual factors have on the usability of HIT is challenging because of the network of interactions between humans and technology that occur in the same or different contexts within a unique healthcare system. Yet, it is important to identify usability problems in order to be able to design and implement HIT. This article begins by describing the current use of HIT with respect to the healthcare landscape. Next, usability is defined and demonstrated to play a critical role in users’ acceptance and adoption of HIT. The remainder of the article describes a new framework called, healthcare experience design. The healthcare experience design framework models the healthcare experience, which is defined as the composite of all of an individual’s interactions with other humans and HIT. The healthcare experience design framework is a useful conceptual model and methodological approach to identify usability problems in the healthcare system, and its practical application is illustrated using an artificial use case.