Benefits of a physician-facing tablet presentation of patient symptom data: comparing paper and electronic formats

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Research Article

Daniel Glaser¹  Sanjula Jain¹  Philip Kortum¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, 77005, Houston, TX, USA;

关键词: Human engineering;    Data display;    Task performance and analysis;    System usability;    MDASI;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6947-13-99

 received in 2012-12-12, accepted in 2013-08-29,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundProviding patient information to physicians in usable form is of high importance. Electronic presentation of patient data may have benefits in efficiency and error rate reduction for these physician facing interfaces. Using a cancer symptom measurement tool (the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory (MDASI)) we assessed the usability of patient data in its raw paper form and compared that to presentation on two electronic presentation formats of different sizes.MethodsIn two separate experiments, undergraduates completed two identical six-part questionnaires on two twenty-patient MDASI data sets. In Experiment 1, participants completed one questionnaire using a paper packet and the other questionnaire using an in-house designed iPad application. In Experiment 2, MDASI data was evaluated using an iPad and iPod Touch. Participants assessed the usability of the devices directly after use. In a third experiment, medical professionals evaluated the paper and iPad interfaces in order to validate the findings from Experiment 1.ResultsParticipants were faster and more accurate answering questions about patients when using the iPad. The results from the medical professionals were similar. No appreciable accuracy, task time, or usability differences were observed between the iPad and iPod Touch.ConclusionsOverall, the use of our tablet interface increased the accuracy and speed that users could extract pertinent information from a multiple patient MDASI data set compared to paper. Reducing the size of the interface did not negatively affect accuracy, speed, or usability. Generalization of the results to other physician facing interfaces is discussed.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Glaser et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.