Functional analysis of interfaces in U.S. military electronic health record system using UFuRT framework.

The overall aim of this study is to evaluate the usability of U.S. military electronic health record (EHR) system AHLTA using a systematic work-centered evaluation framework UFuRT --- User, Functional, Representational, and Task Analysis. This paper with the focus of Functional Analysis (FA) of AHLTA explores operationalizable methods to study functions supported by user interfaces. A system hierarchy was created to map and uniquely identify all items on the interfaces. These items were then classified independently by 2 evaluators as Operations or Objects. Operations were further classified as either Domain or Overhead function. With acceptable inter-rater agreement, of the 1996 items in the interfaces, 61% were operations, around one fourth of which were Overhead functions. Overhead functions are hypothesized to be targets to be redesigned for improvements in usability.