Usability study of a patient alerts and reminders display component for an electronic medical record system

This work discusses the development of a module for an Electronic Medical Record Management System that displays alerts & reminders to clinicians for patients within an entire hospital area. This entailed the development of a working prototype and its validation via usability testing with potential end users of the system. The development process of this system is outlined in detail, beginning with the task analysis performed at various institutions and detailing the complete system design. The main module of this system is the Patient List, a visual component that displays every patient along with a series of icons that are representative of the pending services and alerts for each particular patient. Usability testing confirmed that user satisfaction was very high for this system and that the system has the potential to increase the speed that can be achieved using this system when compared to paper-based medical records.