Usability Evaluation of Electronic forms and Collaborative Assessment Report in an Inter-municipality Health Care team for Dementia Diagnose

Abstract

Despite that paper-based medical procedures have historically been the most common way of registering and exchanging patient data; it does not avoid the potential risks of unauthenticated access; unregistered data loss; legibility and difficulty to share the data with third parties. The Coordination Reform 2009 (Samhandlingsreformen) has demanded from municipalities to implement health services for citizens based on electronic messaging that eases the access to and sharing of patient data. In the context of the Research project “Collaboration without borders” (Samhandling uten grenser); electronic forms and collaborative assessment report by videoconference have been usability tested in this study in order to evaluate the potential application of these electronic tools in an inter-municipality workflow of dementia assessment. The results showed that electronic forms helped to reduce the paper load of the process; allowing repeated access to the forms for retrospective amendments and reviews. The videoconference with document sharing was reported to be a very effective and satisfactory tool to cooperatively work on the final report of the assessment between the members of the dementia team.