Usability Inspection of a Mobile Clinical Decision Support App and a Short Form Heuristic Evaluation Checklist.

Introduction: Health information technology design teams should engage clinical end users as part of the early design process to ensure that mobile clinical decision support applications that can augment cognition are usable and fit clinical workflows. However, a major challenge of this approach is the limited availability of clinicians and other health care workers for design engagement due to their professional time constraints. Therefore, there is a need for a short form heuristic evaluation checklist that facilitates engagement of clinical end users early in the design process for mobile clinical decision support applications. Methods: As part of a broader mobile clinical decision support design project for urinary tract infection diagnosis in nursing homes (UTIDecide), we developed a long form heuristic evaluation checklist synthesized from prior usability inspection research. Usability inspection was conducted by two groups of evaluators: the familiar group (n = 5) and the unfamiliar group (n = 4). Results: The long form heuristic evaluation checklist totals 11 categories and 200 heuristics. Evaluation results from the long form checklist were analyzed to produce a short form heuristic evaluation checklist of 30 items with the aim of reducing clinician engagement time. Conclusion: Developing a short form heuristic evaluation checklist to facilitate engagement of clinicians as part of early stage mobile clinical decision support projects is a necessary and feasible undertaking. Future work will include testing of the short form checklist with newer versions of UTIDecide and other mobile clinical decision support apps.