• Evaluating the Usability of Pharmacy Information System from the users' perspective: Application of Nielson’s Heuristics
  • Monireh Tahvildarzadeh,1 Bahlol Rahimi,2 Zahra Yasemi,3,*
    1. Student research committee, Lorestan university of medical sciences, Khorramabad, Iran
    2. Department of Health Information Technology, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran
    3. Student research committee, Lorestan university of medical sciences, Khorramabad, Iran


  • Introduction: The pharmacy information system (PIS) is one of the hospital information systems (HISs) that it used to manage and distribute medicines in the hospital. Although numerous studies have shown the advantages of using these systems, but designing some of them has caused problems to interact with the system by users. The purpose of this study is evaluating the usability of pharmacy information system based-on heuristic evaluation method from the user's perspective.
  • Methods: Current study is a cross-sectional descriptive study in which by using the heuristic evaluation methods. Problems with usability of pharmacy information system that used in more than 200 hospitals in our country were identified and classified by 7 evaluators (system users). Then the severity of each problem was determined.
  • Results: In this evaluation 135 heuristic violations were identified. From among 10 heuristics, the tenth heuristic that is "help and documentation" was not defined in this system. "visibility of system status" and "consistency and standards" heuristics had the most number of problems with 21 errors (15.15%). The least problems were related to " error prevention" heuristic with 9 errors (6.67%). 102 (75.56%) of the total number of identified usability problems (135) were rated major and catastrophic.
  • Conclusion: Despite of the widespread use of hospital information systems in nationwide, designing the many of them have numerous usability problems. Failure to resolve these problems could effect on user interaction by system and cause increasing the cost, safety reduction, users dissatisfaction and create workaround. Therefore, it's recommended that the usability of these systems evaluate continuously.
  • Keywords: Evaluation study, Hospital information system, Pharmacy information system, Usability evaluation