RIS ID

22157

Publication Details

This paper originally published as Qiu, Y, Yu, P and Hyland, P, A multi-method approach to assessing Health Information Systems end users' training needs, Medinfo 2007: Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics; Building Sustainable Health Systems, 2007, 1352-1356. Copyright IOS Press 2007. Original conference proceedings information available here.

Abstract

In order to guarantee acceptance and effective usage of health information system (HIS), its end users must be appro-priately trained. However many existing training programs did not adequately satisfy its user’s needs and the training objectives. This is because they did not envisage the problems that users might encounter when performing specific tasks. Therefore it is essential for developing a good training pro-gram to precisely assess end users’ training needs. However, applying traditional approaches for Training Needs Assess-ment (TNA) such as interviews or surveys alone is insufficient. These methods are limited in their capacity to understand the cognitive processes a learner follows in learning a new com-puter program. Usability testing, with its ability to gather rich data about human computer interaction, overcomes the deficiencies of traditional approaches. Therefore, this paper pro-poses a multi-method approach, which combines usability testing method, interviews and questionnaire surveys to assess HIS end users training needs. This innovative method is able to precisely reveal the training needs for different levels of HIS users. A case study, which applied this method on assessing the training needs for users of a nursing information system, demonstrates its feasibility.

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