User Interface Optimization for an Electronic Medical Record System

Many information technology-enabled healthcare applications have failed because their interfaces are difficult to use. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid in the health informatics community to designing effective user interfaces that are acceptable to healthcare professionals. This paper illustrates a method for improving application interface usability by applying sequential pattern analysis to analyze temporal event sequences recorded in an electronic medical record system. Such event sequences, or clickstreams, reflect clinicians' navigation patterns in their everyday interactions with the computer system. The identified patterns have been used by software developers to calibrate the user interface of the system, so that the within-application workflow is better aligned with clinicians' mental model of medical problem-solving. Such inferred patterns may also help to modify clinicians' suboptimal practice behavior components, as manifested through their actual usage of this point-of-care electronic system.