Usability Evaluation of Tablet-Based Electronic Medical Record Interface in Supporting Elderly Medical Doctors

Recently, tablet-based devices have become significantly more utilized platforms for electronic medical record (EMR) systems. EMR is the digital counterpart of the medical doctor’s office paper charts. EMR systems contain the medical and treatment histories of the patients in a unified practice. Nevertheless, statistics indicate that a considerable percentage of medical doctors are elderly, aged 60 and above. As using mobile handheld devices (including tablets) poses a well-recognized usability challenge for elderly users, the user interface (UI) usability of tablet-based EMR systems must be thoroughly assessed, considering the needs of elderly medical doctors. Accordingly, our objective is to address this need. Three expert evaluators implemented the heuristic evaluation (HE) approach to evaluate the UI usability of a commercial EMR system that is a tablet-based platform. Applying the HE approach helped identify usability problems that elderly medical doctors might encounter when utilizing a tablet-based EMR UI. In total, eight usability problems contributed to the seven heuristic violations discovered.