Nurses’ perceptions and problems in the usability of a medication safety app

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The majority of medication apps support medication adherence. Equally, if not more important, is medication safety. Few apps report on medication safety, and fewer studies have been conducted with these apps. Objectives: The usability of a medication safety app was tested with nurses to reveal their perceptions of the graphical user interface and to discover problems they encountered in using the app. Methods: Usability testing of the app was conducted with RN-BSN students and informatics students (n = 18). Perceptions of the graphical components were gathered in pretest and posttest questionnaires, and video recordings of the usability testing were transcribed. The significance of the difference in mean performance time for 8 tasks was tested, and qualitative analysis was deployed to identify problems encountered and to rate the severity of each problem. Results: While all participants perceived the graphical user interface as easy to understand, nurses took significantly more time to complete certain tasks. More nurses found the medication app to be lacking in intuitiveness of user interface design, in capability to match real-world data, and in providing optimal information architecture. Conclusion: To successfully integrate mobile devices in healthcare, developers must address the problems that nurses encountered in use of the app.

KEYWORDS:

• Healthcare workers
• medication safety apps
• smartphones
• usability

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dr. Jeff Huth, MD, Ph.D. Pharmacology, Founder and CEO of ScopiaRx, for providing the medication app to conduct usability testing and for giving us timely feedback on the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this study.