JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Youth with Special Health Care Needs (YSHCN) have chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional conditions that require health care and other services beyond typical utilization. We evaluated, using the concurrent think aloud (CTA) method , the Website Evaluation Questionnaire (WEQ), a task performance analysis, and Van Den Haak et als’ problem relevance metric, a care transition tool for providers of YSHCN. This tool, the Texas Transition Toolkit (T3) supports medical home providers by providing: a “one-stop-shop” to research literature on transition care, a catalog of relevant tools for providers to assess their organization or the YSHCN and families they work with, and guides for developing a transition program in their medical home. Our mixed-methods deep dive into the usability and functionality of the T3 focused on ten end-users from one medical home in Texas. While the T3 was well-received by end users, our analyses identified areas of concern regarding the application. End-users reported the most difficulty in two areas of functionality and usability: inefficient search function and navigation characteristics. This was reflected in both the CTA trial and the WEQ, and supported by the task performance and relevance analyses. Participants reported low satisfaction with search (75.3%) and navigation dimensions (ease of use=75.7%; hyperlinks=78%; and structure=79%), relatively high number of search and navigation related problems (n=21, or 67.75% of the total problems detected1), and low tasks completion for tasks involving finding tools (70%) which requires searching and navigation. The problems identified around search and navigation functionality were also assessed as ‘relevant’. Each of these areas of analyses triangulate on search and navigation issues, suggesting a robustness of results. Results from the usability trial provided a road map for optimizing the T3, and highlighted the importance of evaluating eHealth technologies with end users.