Incorporating usability design factors into development of clinical decision support systems

Usability is an important component of software engineering. Medical computer systems that take usability into consideration allow users to improve clinical productivity effectively and efficiently, while promoting positive feelings of satisfaction. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) share similar usability issues as other applications, and raise unique user concerns. In this paper, we propose the CDSS usability framework as a solution for improving the usability of decision support tools. We also suggest that CDSSs should be evaluated using the discounted usability method to iteratively improve CDSS tools.