Assessing the usability of web-based personal health records

Abstract

Personal Health Records (PHRs) are becoming an important tool to manage individual health information, its usability among the general population remains of its most unexplored areas. One of its subset is Web-based PHRs, which is an online repository for the storage of individuals' health information. There are different ways in which data gets into a PHR, one of the most common ways are for people to type in their information manually. This study will assess how people entered common PHR health data into two recently released PHRs, they are Googlehealth and Microsoft healthvault. The results indicate that there is a significant different among them especially on specific tasks such as allergies and medical history. In addition, it highlights they way user interfaces affects usability. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.