CONTEXTUAL DIVERSITY IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS' USABILITY

EHR usability issues are among the barriers that hinder achieving the potential benefits of EHR and EMR systems. Contextual studies are growing and has importance in many disciplines that include HealthIT. Many of the developed enterprise systems have failed due to their poor usability. In this paper, we propose a new definition and extended framework "TURF +" to define, evaluate and measure EHR usability with respect to contextual diversity. The usability enhancement is achieved by having an intuitive interface that is business-centric while maintaining the consistency of the common tasks and workflows across specialties. Our framework considers contextual interface "adaptability" as another dimension of usability. The work is achieved by extending TURF framework to reflect the ability of EHR's to adapt to healthcare's contextual diversities as an indicator of a context-sensitive representation which concentrates on maximizing effectiveness, efficiency, safety and satisfaction.