Integrating heuristic evaluation with cognitive walkthrough: development of a hybrid usability inspection method.

Developing more usable healthcare information systems has become an important goal in health informatics. Although methods from usability engineering have appeared and been effectively applied in the design and evaluation of healthcare systems, there continues to be reports of deployment of unusable systems and issues with adoption of healthcare IT worldwide. In this paper we propose a new cost-effective usability engineering approach for healthcare IT that integrates two of the major usability inspection approaches (heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough) into one combined approach that leverages the advantages of both heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. The approach will be described as will a pilot application of the method in evaluating the usability of a well-known electronic health record system. Implications and future work will also be described.