USER EVALUATION OF AN INTEGRATED MEDICAL WORKSTATION FOR CLINICAL-DATA ANALYSIS

Results are presented of the user evaluation of an integrated medical workstation for support of clinical research. Twenty-seven users were recruited from medical and scientific staff of the University Hospital Dijkzigt, the Faculty of Medicine of the Erasmus University Rotterdam , and from other Dutch medical institutions; and all were given a writ ten, self-contained tutorial. Subsequently, an experiment was done in which six clinical data analysis problems had to be solved and an eval uation form was filled out. The aim of this user evaluation was to obt ain insight in the benefits of integration for support of clinical dat a analysis for clinicians and biomedical researchers. The problems wer e divided into two sets, with gradually more complex problems. In the first set users were guided in a stepwise fashion to solve the problem s. In the second set each stepwise problem had an open counterpart. Du ring the evaluation, the workstation continuously recorded the user's actions. From these results significant differences became apparent be tween clinicians and non-clinicians for the correctness (means 54% and 81%, respectively, p = 0.04), completeness (means 64% and 88%, respec tively, p = 0.01), and number of problems solved (means 67% and 90%, r espectively, p = 0.02). These differences were absent for the stepwise problems. Physicians tend to skip more problems than biomedical resea rchers. No statistically significant differences were found between us ers with and without clinical data analysis experience, for correctnes s (means 74% and 72%, respectively, p = 0.95), and completeness (means 82% and 79%, respectively, p = 0.40). It appeared that various clinic al research problems can be solved easily with support of the workstat ion; the results of this experiment can be used as guidance for the de velopment of the successor of this prototype workstation and serve as a reference for the assessment of next versions.