Evaluating physician satisfaction regarding user interactions with an electronic medical record system.

A limiting factor in realizing the full potential of electronic medical records (EMR) is physician reluctance to use these applications. There have been very few formal usability studies of experienced physician users of EMRs in routine clinical use. We distributed the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS) to 75 primary care physicians who routinely use the Brigham and Women's Integrated Computing System (BICS). BICS scored highest in the area of screen design and lowest in the area of system capability. Overall user satisfaction was most highly correlated with screen design and layout, and surprisingly not with system response time. Human-computer interaction studies can help focus our design efforts as we strive to increase clinician usage of information technology.