An Emotion-Focused Approach Towards Improving Clinicians' Work-Related User Experience

Sammanfattning: Recent studies have associated clinician burnout with health information technology use. Researchers have attributed this negative impact of health information technology use on clinician well-being to poor system usability and insufficient clinician involvement in system design and implementation.Against this backdrop, this thesis first examined the discrete negative and positive emotions that clinicians experience at work in connection with health information technology use, and defined desirable user experience goals for health information technology design and implementation. Second, it identified different breakdowns in the communication between hospital nursing staff and information technology staff members.Data were collected through focus groups and interviews with registered nurses, nursing assistants, physicians, and information technology staff members working at or affiliated with a large Swedish hospital. The data were analyzed qualitatively through thematic analysis.Hospital nursing staff and physicians were found to experience frustration, perplexity, anxiety, alienation, psychological and moral distress, joy, relief, relaxation, and confidence in connection with their work-related use of health information technology. On this basis, joy, relaxation, confidence, gratitude and pride were identified as desirable user experience goals for clinicians' work-related information technology use. Finally, breakdowns in the communication between hospital nursing staff and information technology staff members were found to include lack of user studies, low-level filtering of nursing staff's electronic error reports, unintelligible electronic error reports, and nursing staff not attending in-person training sessions and not checking information technology-related communications on the intranet.These findings contribute to the field of human─computer interaction by shedding light on information technology staff members' work and on clinicians' work-related user experience, and by defining user experience goals for clinicians' work-related information technology use. Health information technology designers and implementers can draw from these findings to foster clinician well-being through the design of health information technology systems and routines.