User interaction simplification method for healthcare mobile applications

In the paper an evaluation and optimisation framework for medical data access systems user interface is presented. User interface design seems to be of crucial importance for clinical data access applications acceptance, in particular for the applications running on handheld computers where the interface tools are significantly limited. The ease of program use depends strongly on the correct user interface design and on the algorithms which try to predict the user decisions and interactions made in the process of data access or modification. If the program is able to correctly predict the user actions and fetch him reasonable defaults then the number of interface actions which the user must do is significantly reduced. The method presented here focuses on typical functions available in clinical mobile data access systems: medication prescriptions and diagnostic and laboratory tests orders. The user interaction with an application is considered as the sequence of decisions. Using the records stored in the hospital database, the algorithm finds the most probable decisions at the subsequent stages of the interaction and uses it as defaults presented to the user. In this way instead of entering the data from the keyboard the user can much faster select it from the list.