Assessing Users Involvement in Analysis and Design Tasks of Electronic Health Information Systems: Experiences, Challenges, and Suggestions to Optimise Involvement
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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
HELINA and JHIA
Abstract
User requirements play a vital role in the development of usable EHIS. For developers
to design better quality, relevant and safer EHIS that meet user needs, they are required to actively
engage stakeholders especially in the analysis and design tasks of its development life cycle. This is
because they provide context appropriate solutions based on their needs. However, in most cases
developers ignore health stakeholders’ input especially during these tasks due to varying perspectives
and expectations, complexity, high cost, and variability in time to complete the tasks. This has
resulted into various challenges including difficulty in capturing and interpreting user requirements in
an effective and efficient manner, poorly designed and unusable systems, unsatisfied user needs, and
high maintenance costs. This study thus aimed at assessing users’ involvement in the analysis and
design tasks when developing EHIS with a view to understand their experiences, challenges, and
suggestions to optimise their involvement.
Methods: We employed a cross-sectional survey to investigate and describe the level of user
involvement and challenges faced in the analysis and design tasks of the EHIS development process.
A total of 36 health practitioners from 13 Key health institutions located in Uganda were selected as
respondents.
Results: The study revealed that majority of the respondents was involved in EHIS development,
with a few involved at analysis and design tasks. Increased costs associated with data collection,
followed by lack of consensus in clarifying, articulating and defining user requirements were
recorded as the biggest challenges faced by users at requirements gathering, analysis and system
design tasks. Regards suggestions to optimising users’ involvement in EHIS development tasks, the
study reported that users were very much interested in being involved at all tasks of EHIS
development, and consultation of users was paramount in order to incorporate all their needs in EHIS.
Conclusions: The results from the study demonstrate the value of user involvement at the analysis
and design tasks of EHIS development cycle. User involvement offers benefits in form of reduction in
costs, improved productivity due to users easily arriving at a common consensus and positive growth
in user attitudes. The researchers intend to incorporate suggestions that emerged from this study to
conduct long-term evaluations of existing EHIS and investigate how users’ involvement changes over
time.
Description
12th Health Informatics in Africa Conference (HELINA 2019)
Peer-reviewed and selected under the responsibility of the Scientific Programme Committee
Keywords
Human Centred Design/User Centred Design, User involvement, User stories Analysis and Design