Activity theory and medical informatics: usability, utility, and copability.
Working with health care today also means working with IT-systems. 'Human Factors' or 'user-friendly design' has been renowned as key factors for the development of safe and successful systems in many industries, not least in the IT-business. Likewise in the computerization of health care, the concepts of 'usefulness' and 'usability' will become key issues in the daily life (and death) in health care context at hospitals, at the GP's office, and in the home of the patient. Though it is a pressing problem, the literature is still very scarce on how to meet this challenge. Inspired by activity theory, this paper sets out to coin a term for an important way to ask questions when determining the usefulness of a medical IT-system. We normally ask two types of questions: 'How usable is the system?' (usability), and 'How functional is the system?' (utility). But most important, we will also have to ask: 'How well does the user cope with the new situation?' As a concept for the latter way of asking questions, we will suggest the term 'copability'.
Dept. of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark.
Egil
E
Boisen
Ann
A
Bygholm
Ole K
OK
Hejlesen
D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D003718:Denmark; D008490:Medical Informatics