A study of physicians' interaction with paper-based, character-based and graphical-based patient record systems

The main objective of this thesis is to describe a usability study of physicians' interaction with paper-based, character-based and graphical-based patient record systems. The study compares the graphical user interface with a character-based and a paper-based system in terms of efficiency and user satisfaction. The main measurements used for the tests were the user satisfaction questionnaire and the time to complete typical tasks such as viewing a patient's record, entering notes, and ordering. Three experiments were conducted. The first experiment compares the graphical system with a character-based system. The second experiment compares the graphical system with the paper-based system. The third experiment compares participants of the first experiment versus participants of the second experiment using the graphical system. Dependent-samples t test and independent-samples t test were used to analyze time results, while the Wilcoxon sign-ranked test and Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze user satisfaction.; As part of this thesis we developed a computer-based patient record system, based on usability engineering principles and guidelines. The interface features two main windows of information. The View Record window provides access to the subjective, objective, and assessment information of the medical record. The Order Entry window provides an interface to allow physicians enter medical orders for patients (a process known as the plan). The user interface was developed in Java using JBuilder 4.0. It uses an Oracle database to store and retrieve the patient's medical information.