User-centered Design and Formative Evaluation of a Web Application to Collect and Visualize Real-time Clinician Well-being Levels

Abstract

Background Clinician burnout is increasingly prevalent in the health care workplace. Hospital leadership needs an informatics tool to measure clinicians' well-being levels and provide empirical evidence to improve their work environment. Objectives This study aimed to (1) design and implement a web-based application to collect and visualize clinicians' well-being levels and (2) conduct formative usability evaluation. Methods Clinician and staff well-being champions guided the development of the Well-being Check application. User-centered design and Agile principles were used for incremental development of the app. The app included a customizable survey and an interactive visualization. The survey consisted of six standard, two optional, and three additional questions. The interactive visualization included various charts and word clouds with filters for drill-down analysis. The evaluation was done primarily with the rehabilitation (REHAB) team using data-centered approaches through historical survey data and qualitative coding of the free-text explanations and user-centered approaches through the System Usability Scale (SUS). Results The evaluation showed that the app appropriately accommodated historical survey data from the REHAB team, enabling the comparison between self-assessed and perceived team well-being levels, and summarized key drivers based on the qualitative coding of the free-text explanations. Responses from the 23 REHAB team members showed an above-average score (SUS: 80.22), indicating high usability of the app. Conclusion The Well-being Check app was developed in a user-centered manner and evaluated to demonstrate its effectiveness and usability. Future work includes iterative refinement of the app and designing a pre-poststudy using the app to measure the change in clinicians' well-being levels for quality improvement intervention.