B3:    Improving user acceptance of health telematics systems : what are the technological and human issues related to user friendliness?

Ilias Iakovidis PhD. Scientific Officer, European Commission: Information Society Programme - Applications relating to Health (Greece), Constantine Stephanidis Professor, Human Computer Interaction and Assistive Technology Laboratory at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (Greece)

Target level: BEGINNERS

What are the technological and human issues related to user friendliness?

Despite the many years of research and development, health telematics applications and services are not widely used. There are still many technical, legal and organizational challenges for implementation and wider deployment of such services. Amongst them, perhaps the most critical one is user acceptance. In this context, users are doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers, researchers, health managers and administrators, and ultimately patients-citizens of the Information Society. Three key factors, beyond the obvious incentives, that are associated with the challenge of user acceptance are:

Convincing cases that demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of telematics applications and services; health telematics education and training which help users to overcome the fear of technology and build the basis for effective usage of the applications; and user-friendliness of the emerging healthcare telematics applications and services ensuring efficient and effective interaction.

In this tutorial, we briefly overview the European Commission activities and results that could be categorized under the category "convincing cases", especially in the area of electronic health record systems, regional health networks and telemedicine (telemonitoring and teleconsultation). Discussion summarizing the major "problems" of user acceptance (mostly referring to health professionals) will be presented. Major emphasis of the tutorial will be given to the Human-Computer Interaction aspects of user-friendliness.

One of the main factors affecting the overall acceptability and usefulness is the user interface. The design and development of user interfaces is particularly challenging, due to different characteristics of medical systems: diverse (groups of) users with different backgrounds, education, training, skills, perspectives, requirements, preferences and the like. Moreover, the same user may have changing requirements over time, e.g. a doctor utilizing system either for diagnosis or for treatment; changing environments, including hospitals, health care centers, mobile care and first aid units, etc, either in rural or urban areas and patient homes; different usage patterns, e.g. diagnosis, treatment, information provision, research; personal or group collaborative work.

Also, we will discuss how to capture the diversity inherent in the interaction design space. This includes, but is not limited to: diversity in the end-user population in terms of their organizational role on the one hand, and their individual, or community-oriented characteristics (e.g. abilities, skills, preferences, cultural background) on the other; diversity in the context of use of the final system, both in terms of physical environment (e.g. hospital, ambulance, home) and in terms of situation of use (e.g., critical decision support, casual information retrieval); and diversity in the interaction platform (e.g., desktop, mobile unit, operating room, home).

The tutorial is well suited for developers of health telematics applications and services, as well as for users.