Designing for Ease of Use of Inpatient Technology

The fields of health services, medical informatics, and human–computer interaction have begun to investigate electronic approaches to providing detailed health information to patients. Building on a custom Personal Health Record portal infrastructure that we have developed to provide access to real-time medication information for hospitalized patients, we are currently engaging clinicians and patients in user-centered design sessions to explore patient-friendly views of the information. Through interactive browsing of organized views of this medication information in our portal, patients can maintain awareness of scheduled and completed medication therapies, and learn more about them by accessing educational summaries. To evaluate the impact of providing timely access to our portal in the inpatient setting, validated surveys will be used to measure patient satisfaction, engagement and knowledge of inpatient medications.