Human Factors in Systems Design

System Design 1
HUMAN FACTORS IN SYSTEMS DESIGN
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System Design 2
Part ONE: The interactive system and its users: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems
Currently, interactive systems are used in different areas such as agriculture and education. An
interactive system can be defined as a computer system that involves interaction between human
and the computer (Broy and Stølen, 2012). Some of the examples of these systems include
automatic ticket vending machines and e-commerce websites. However, this paper has focused
on Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. These systems are used widely in hospitals to
enable medical practitioners to record, retrieve and monitor patient’s health records with a lot of
ease. Also, it enable medical professionals from different units such as laboratory, intensive care,
surgery and emergency among others to access and update patient’s records from central
database, therefore enhancing the treatment process (Narayan, Gagné and Safavi-Naini, 2010,
p.49). Moreover, EHR also provides reminders such as the time at which patients are supposed to
undergo operations. Medical professionals such as immunologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists
and surgeons are the primary users of EHR systems since they have the permission to read and
update patient’s records directly. In contrast, patients provide information that is recorded into
EHR systems, hence they are secondary users (Chen, Lu and Jan, 2012, p.3377).
Part TWO: The use cases
EHR system has many use cases that explain how it works. However, this paper has focused only
in laboratory section.
i. Locate data: A Requesting Caregiver (RC) locates patient’s laboratory data from
various RHIOs (Madden et al., 2016, p.1145).
ii. Contact Responder: Here, the RC establishes connection with responder’s system.

System Design 3
iii. Validation: Having established connection with responder’s system, the responder
request RC’s credentials such as username and password to ensure that he/she is
communicating with the right user of the system.
iv. Patient Identity: In this step, the RC and responder discusses about patient’s
information to ensure that correct data has been transmitted. Sometimes, this process
involves identifier actor. Moreover, patients are also involved in case there are some
additional information which are needed for further identification.
v. Find available results: In this step, the responder tries to find available laboratory
information regarding the patient. This is achieved by entering patient’s credentials
into laboratory related systems. However, the RC tells responder to check specific
tests to enhance privacy (Sun et al., 2011, p.378).
vi. Authorize data release: In this step, the RC asks the patient if data can be released.
The patient is requested to sign an authorization form.
vii. Review results: Having received signed authorization form, the responder gives the
RC permission to view specified results. Besides, the RCs’ are also allowed to import
specified results so that they may access them from their EHR system. However,
partial import is recommended mostly.
viii. Verify receipt: In this step, the RC ascertains that he/she has received specified
laboratory data, therefore enhancing reliability.
ix. Log transaction: Last but not least, all the necessary information regarding the
transaction such as the date are recorded to make sure that they can be accessed easily
when the need arises. Besides, these logs can also be accessible to patients. Hence
enhancing privacy (McAlearney et al., 2012, p.296).

System Design 4
Part THREE: The usability requirements
Performance: The EHR system is required to complete transactions in little amount of
time. For example, surgeons and other medical practitioners should perform a transaction
successfully without any assistance from developers and system programmers. Also, a
given process should be completed in a given amount of time like 10 minutes. The most
expected time should be 15 minutes (Kopanitsa et al., 2013, p.44). Performing tasks with
less time enhances treatment process. In contrast, taking a lot of time to carry out a
specific task halts treatment process, hence patient will not receive medication on time
resulting in additional health impacts. For example, taking 20 minutes to carry out a
specific task such as accessing patient’s records results in inconveniences (Kopanitsa,
Tsvetkova and Veseli, 2012, p.360).
User friendliness: The users of the EHR system such as nurses should be able to carry out
transactions comfortably without straining. For example, medical practitioners should be
able to record and retrieve patient’s information easily. These processes should not
involve a lot of sophistication. They should take less time to understand how the system
works. All activities should be accessed from one screen. However, medical practitioners
can switch to other screens when the need arises such as seeking consultation from other
professions who are in different departments. Moreover, the EHR system interface should
be easily understood by medical specialists at the fast sight. All the buttons, labels and
other components such as checkboxes should be captioned clearly to enhance users’
understanding as well as reducing unnecessary confusions (Middleton et al., 2013).
Error tolerance: The EHR system should be free from errors. This is because matters
dealing with patients are very sensitive and a small mistake can lead to patient’s death.