User Testing of an Admission, Discharge, Transfer System: Usability Evaluation

Introduction: To improve the first step of the hospitalization procedure, appropriate interaction must be established between users and the admission, discharge, and transfer system. The aim of this study was to evaluate the usability of the ADT system in some of selected Iranian non-teaching hospitals.Material and Methods: This study was cross-sectional research that has evaluated the usability of a selected ADT system using the think-aloud method by 11 medical record administrators. Users were asked to follow the provided scenario, then share and elaborate on what they saw, thought about, did, felt, and decided during their interaction with the system. Users' feedbacks were collected and organized into four main categories for further processing.Results: To evaluate the usability of an ADT system, four routine scenario tasks were followed by users and only 45.45% of them could implement all tasks. Overall, 36 independent problems were identified. All problems were related to the data entry categories that accounted for the largest share. The most important problems were related to the issues regarding "date of birth" field in this category which deals with the outpatient admission process.Conclusion: The study of the usability testing method indicated that the ADT subsystem of non-teaching hospital has many problems in interact with real users with the system. It showed that more than half of the users could not completely and successfully perform the entire real-world scenario tasks. Furthermore, the most usability problems were found in data entry categories.