1. What’s to Learn from Unvalidated Sources of Health Information? In International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), 2015 (pp. 593-596), IEEE. With Sherrie Komiak
Unvalidated Sources of Health Information (USHI)
have been very successful in spite of the risk they pose to the
health and well-being of their users. Our goal is to present a
framework for the future study of USHI that studies the basic
factors responsible for its success so as to enable the creation of
better strategies to curb their use. Such studies leading to the
identification of the components of USHI’s success can be useful
in improving the design of other less adopted consumer
healthcare systems. To achieve this goal, we suggest the “reverseengineering” of various information technology (IT) adoption
and success theories to identify the actionable components of
their antecedents with respect to USHI that can be directly useful
to designers of IT artifacts. We also speculate on several potential
benefits of such research beyond addressing the threat USHI
represents.
2. The Impact of Senior-Friendliness Guidelines on Seniors’ Use of Personal Health Records, In International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), (pp. 597-602). IEEE. With Sherrie and Paul Komiak
Usability is a key determinant of the adoption and use of Personal Health Record (PHR) by seniors. Usability principles exist to guide developers in the creation of senior friendly PHRs. The purpose of this study is to understand why seniors still perceive the usability of PHRs as low in spite of these publicly available guidelines. 16 PHRs were evaluated with a senior-focused website usability guideline to assess developers’ level of compliance. We found that though there are usability issues that need to be improved upon by PHR developers, some of the PHRs should be usable and senior-friendly. To understand the discrepancy between results of heuristic or guideline-based evaluation and reports from actual use, we contend that a need to assess existing usability standards for their suitability in guiding the creation of senior-friendly PHRs exists.
3. On the need for theory-grounded guidelines for designing senior-friendly personal health records. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Workshop on HCI Research in MIS, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, December 13, 2015. With Sherrie and Paul Komiak
Personal Health Records (PHR) have the potential to improve healthcare access and quality while decreasing healthcare cost. However, the usability of PHRs is one of the major factors militating against adoption and sustained use by seniors. While senior-focused usability guidelines for websites exist, there are no usability guidelines for web-based senior-friendly PHRs. General senior-focused website usability guidelines do not cover enough of peculiarities of PHRsthat distinguishes it from normal websites like users’ input and interaction functions, health information security requirements, and seniors’ physiological needs. This paper, therefore, showcases the limitations of general website usability guidelines when they are applied in the PHR domain. To address this research gap, this paper aims to develop a new usability guideline for the development of senior-friendly PHRs. We do this in steps. First, a content analysis study is conducted on an online discussion forum on the perceptions of currently available PHRs. Second, a usability guideline for senior-friendly PHRs is developed based on Wixom and Todd’s Information Systems quality theory, the mental model theory and on the results of our content analysis in step 1. The new theory-grounded and practically suggested usability guideline has the potential to improve PHR design and adoption for seniors. An empirical study to test the proposed usability guideline is called for in future studies.