Development and Usability Evaluation of a Web-Based Health Information Technology Dashboard of Quality and Economic Indicators

Abstract

Introduction: Strategic dashboards, including hospital economic monitoring systems, play a major role in analyzing data and making decisions. As the health system is a multidimensional ecosystem, decision-makers and healthcare officials must gather and integrate information from numerous health information systems to monitor and direct healthcare centers. This study aims to develop and usability evaluation of a health information technology dashboard in Iran that utilizes qualitative and economic indicators.Material and Methods: This study was conducted in four phases. It included extracting the requirements of the system through the focus group technique. Based on these results, a comprehensive economic dashboard was developed. Then, the system’s usability is evaluated from the perspectives of experts and end-users by two scales of Nielsen and USE, respectively.Results: The dashboard was developed on the web and different access levels were defined for users according to their roles. This dashboard provides the ability to integrate information from different systems at the national level for decision-makers. The results of usability evaluation from users' point of view showed that it has a good level of usability. Furthermore, evaluation results revealed that aesthetic aspects and simple design and clarity of system status (0%), privacy (1.49%), "visibility and clarity of the system" and "adaptation between the system and the real world" (2.98%), have the fewest design errors. With 14 problems (20.89%), "recognition rather than remembering" and "compliance with uniformity and standards" have the highest frequency of problems.Conclusion: The development of an extensive integrated economic health dashboard, based on usability principles that are suitable for its stakeholders regardless of their specialty and granted access level, is welcomed by the health economist, hospital managers, and the ones who have an active role in monitoring and coordinating hospitals or even in greater scales such as national wide decision makers.