JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Clinical competencies (CC) are the cornerstone goals of medical education and typically improve with experience. However, health professionals rely on vetted guidance such as protocols, guidelines, and procedures to perform and perfect their roles as clinicians. Nevertheless, finding appropriate guidance is often difficult as there are many knowledge sources, and disconnected systems where this guidance resides. Prior to this study, we developed an mHealth platform for the efficient dissemination of locally vetted medical guidance to address the mentioned challenges. This platform was found to be usable and acceptable for clinical practice in previous usability studies in a single-center setting.

Objective:

The aim of this study is to assess the usability of an mHealth platform (C8 Health) for the dissemination of locally vetted medical guidance to health professionals in a multi-center setting.

Methods:

Ethics approval for the study was received by the Geneva Canton’s Ethics Committee and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Institutional Review Board. Eligible health professionals, from two anesthesia departments in Switzerland, who have used the mHealth platform for more than 3 months, were asked to answer a questionnaire named the mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ) through an online survey software. The MAUQ questionnaire is a validated questionnaire for the assessment of the usability of mHealth solutions targeted at health professionals. In addition, anonymous usage analytics were collected using third-party software. The primary outcome was the composite MAUQ score, calculated on a 7-point Likert scale. Secondary outcomes were the differential MAUQ scores, between institutions, and between participants at different levels of training. Tertiary outcomes were user usage metrics during the study period.

Results:

Forty-five health professionals out of 170 eligible participants in both institutions answered the questionnaire (26.4% response rate). Ninety-six percent were physicians and four percent were administrative staff. Among the physicians, 66.5% were senior physicians and the rest were residents. The usability of the platform was rated at 5.47 (SD = 0.42) on a 7-point Likert scale. The differential scores between institutions and training levels were not significant (p > 0.05). From January 1st, 2023, to July 14th, 2023, there were a mean of 289.5 monthly active users and 159.5 weekly active users, with 3.6 sessions per user per day and 3.0 different content items used per user per day from both institutions combined. Sixty one percent of users during the study period were physicians while 30% were certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs). Ninety five percent of the usage was from mobile devices.

Conclusions:

In this multi-center study, an mHealth solution for the dissemination of medical guidance received a high MAUQ score from health professionals. This study provides more evidence for the importance of usability to support the adoption of mHealth among health professionals.