How to interact with medical terminologies? Formative usability evaluations comparing three approaches for supporting th
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(2020) 20:261
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
How to interact with medical terminologies? Formative usability evaluations comparing three approaches for supporting the use of MedDRA by pharmacovigilance specialists Romaric Marcilly1,2* , Laura Douze1,2, Sébastien Ferré3 , Bissan Audeh4 , Carlos Bobed5 , Agnès Lillo-Le Louët6 , Jean-Baptiste Lamy7 and Cédric Bousquet4,8
Abstract Background: Medical terminologies are commonly used in medicine. For instance, to answer a pharmacovigilance question, pharmacovigilance specialists (PVS) search in a pharmacovigilance database for reports in relation to a given drug. To do that, they first need to identify all MedDRA terms that might have been used to code an adverse reaction in the database, but terms may be numerous and difficult to select as they may belong to different parts of the hierarchy. In previous studies, three tools have been developed to help PVS identify and group all relevant MedDRA terms using three different approaches: forms, structured query-builder, and icons. Yet, a poor usability of the tools may increase PVS’ workload and reduce their performance. This study aims to evaluate, compare and improve the three tools during two rounds of formative usability evaluation. Methods: First, a cognitive walkthrough was performed. Based on the design recommendations obtained from this evaluation, designers made modifications to their tools to improve usability. Once this re-engineering phase completed, six PVS took part in a usability test: difficulties, errors and verbalizations during their interaction with the three tools were collected. Their satisfaction was measured through the System Usability Scale. The design recommendations issued from the tests were used to adapt the tools. Results: All tools had usability problems related to the lack of guidance in the graphical user interface (e.g., unintuitive labels). In two tools, the use of the SNOMED CT to find MedDRA terms hampered their use because French PVS were not used to it. For the most obvious and common terms, the icons-based interface would appear to be more useful. For the less frequently used MedDRA terms or those distributed in different parts of the hierarchy, the structured query-builder would be preferable thanks to its great power and flexibility. The form-based tool seems to be a compromise. (Continued on next page)
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Univ. Lille, CHU Lille, ULR 2694 - METRICS: Évaluation des technologies de santé et des pratiques médicales, F-59000 Lille, France 2 Inserm, CHU Lille, CIC-IT/Evalab 1403 – Centre d’Investigation Clinique, F-59000 Lille, France Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons l
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