COGNITIVE EVALUATION - HOW TO ASSESS THE USABILITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTH-CARE

As the adoption of information technology has increased, so too has th e demands that these systems become more adapted to the physicians and nurses environments, to make access and management of information eas ier. The developers of information systems in Healthcare must use qual ity management techniques to ensure that their product will satisfy gi ven requirements. This underlines the importance of the preliminary ph ase where Users Requirements are elicited. Some methodologies, such as KAVAS (E.M.S. Van Gennip, F. Grimy, Med. Inform. 18, 1993, 179) chose to use a continuous assessment protocol as a key strategy for quality management. At each stage of the conception and development of a prot otype, the assessment checks that it conforms to the expectation of th e users' requirements. The methodology of evaluation is then seen as a dynamic:process which is able to improve the design and development o f a dedicated system. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the necessity to include a cognitive evaluation phase in the process of ev aluation by: (1) evaluating the integration (usability) of the I.T. in the activity of the users; and (2) understanding the motives underlyi ng their management of information. This will help the necessary integ ration of information management in the workload of the healthcare pro fessionals and the compatibility of the prototypes with the daily acti vity of the users. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.