A usability study of physicians' and nurses' interaction with PDA and laptop applications to access an electronic patient record system

The main objective of this research was to conduct a usability study to prove the viability of PDAs for supporting nurses' and physicians' tasks at point of care. To achieve this goal physicians' and nurse's application prototypes were developed for accessing and updating electronic patient record systems with PDAs and three studies of physicians and nurses interaction with these applications were conducted. The first interaction study compared physicians' interaction with two versions (PDA & Laptop) of an electronic patient record system. The second study compared nurses' interaction with two versions (PDA & Laptop) of a nursing documentation system. The third study compared nurses' and physicians' interaction while performing common tasks such as reading and writing a patient's record. The three studies compared the users' interaction in terms of performance parameters such as time to complete tasks, the number of tasks completed and subjective user satisfaction. These studies also served to evaluate the usability attributes of learnability, efficiency and user satisfaction of the applications. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).