Applying a User-Centered Approach to Building a Mobile Personal Health Record App: Development and Usability Study

Abstract

Background A personal health record (PHR) system encourages patients to engage with their own health care by giving them the ability to manage and keep track of their own health data. Of the numerous PHR systems available in the market, many are Web-based patient portals and a few are mobile apps. They have mainly been created by hospitals and electronic health record (EHR) vendors. One major limitation of these hospital-created PHR systems is that patients can only view specific health data extracted from their EHR. Patients do not have the freedom to add important personal health data they collect in their daily lives into their PHR. Therefore, there is an information gap between clinical visits. Objective The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a new mobile PHR app that can be easily used to manage various types of personal health data to fill the information gap. Methods A user-centered approach was used to guide the development and evaluation of the new mobile PHR app. There were three steps in this study: needs assessment, app design and development, and conducting a usability study. First, a large-scale questionnaire study was conducted with the general population to gain an understanding of their needs and expectations with regard to a mobile PHR app. A mobile PHR app for personal medical data tracking and management was then created based on the results of the questionnaire study. End users were actively involved in all stages of the app development. Finally, a usability study was performed with participants to evaluate the usability of the mobile PHR app, which involved asking participants to finish a set of tasks and to respond to a usability questionnaire. Results In the questionnaire study for needs assessment, there were 609 participants in total. The answers from these participants revealed that they wanted to manage various types of personal health data in a mobile PHR app. Participants also reported some features they desired to have in the app. On the basis of the needs assessment findings, a new mobile PHR app (PittPHR) was created with 6 major modules: health records, history, trackers, contacts, appointments, and resources. This app allows users to customize the trackers according to their needs. In the usability study, there were 15 participants. The usability study participants expressed satisfaction with the app and provided comments and suggestions for further development. Conclusions This new mobile PHR app provides options for users to manage a wide range of personal health data conveniently in one place. The app fills the information gap between clinical visits. The study results indicated that this new mobile PHR app meets the need of users and that users welcome this app.

Evaluation is Key: Providing Appropriate Evaluation Measures for Participatory and User-Centred Design Processes of Healthcare IT

“…Future research is needed to systematically enrich and prioritise the suggested methods and validate the proposed methodological guidance. [20] Heuristic evaluation with non-users [20,93] Think aloud studies with health care providers [20,88,92], patients [88,92,93] and their relatives [89] Interview [87,89,90] Quantitative surveys with patients [20,37,88,90,91,93] and health care providers [20,87,88], using usability questionnaires…”

“…Evaluating [8,32,37,38,86,89,93] and adapting [37,91,93] the application in terms of usability and user acceptance under real-life conditions…”

Development of a Mobile Personal Health Record Application Designed for Emergency Care in Korea; Integrated Information from Multicenter Electronic Medical Records

“…To the best of our knowledge, FirstER is the first mobile app prototype for patients who visit the ED and use their PHRs at other hospitals in an emergency. Whenever patients unintentionally first visited nearby hospitals, FirstER enabled medical personnel to know about the patients' previous underlying diseases, the reasons why they visited other hospitals, and what they were prescribed [17]. Furthermore, we also enabled patients to input their health records (i.e., patient-generated health data), such as conditions and blood pressure results, into FirstER, which then provided physicians with these data to help understand patients' conditions [18].…”

Mutual-Aid Mobile App for Emergency Care: Feasibility Study

“…When perceived ease of use and attitude toward information quality are positive, perceived usefulness is often high [38][39][40]. These findings might help in app design, and developers of an emergency app will need to provide a service that is easy to use, clear and understandable, easy to learn to operate, and easy to navigate and that has clear help messages [41][42][43][44][45].…”