Background: Electronic health applications that aim to share personalized medical information with patients are not frequently found in hospital settings. These inpatient applications can empower patients and caregivers to review and monitor their most updated medical information and improve communication between patients and their providers (such as clinicians, nurses, case managers etc.). However, these applications need to be designed with levels of text, image and content appropriate for the patient perspective. In our prior study, we identified hospitalized patient’s needs and barriers to access of medical information, and designed a novel tablet-based health information application prototype (Figure 1). This innovation aimed to improve patient experience by using a patient-centered tool more robust than the bedside call button.
Purpose: Our goal was to test this pilot tablet-based application which provided hospitalized patient’s access to parts of their daily electronic medical and allowed them to communicate with their healthcare team. We conducted prototype usability testing as the development process.
Description: We tested our design prototype with a semi-structured 30-minute interview of four nurses, two physicians, and four hospitalized patients at Michigan Medicine in Spring 2017. The interviews were recorded and analyzed by an affinity diagram with insight sorting. We went through multiple iterations to resolve discrepancies and distill user opinions. The most frequent themes that emerged from these interviews were: 1) that technology literacy might affect the accessibility of the platform; 2) this technology provides a chance to share protected medical information with other providers; 3) given the multitude of complex medical records, further simplification of the types of information for patients (e.g., by color coding or graphs) is needed; and 4) it is necessary to determine an appropriate educational level of the provided contents.
Conclusions: From the user’s perspective, the application was considered a useful information tool allowing patients to navigate their personalized medical record and minimize repetitive conversations. One challenge of the tool is that it may not be generalizable to all patient populations, as individual technology and health literacy varies from patient to patient. We hope that the lessons learned from this innovation will lead to an improved prototype as we continue to evaluate and innovate our design.
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