Assessing Perceived Usability: Different Types of Hospital Discharge Instructions for College Students

• Madison Roy

  Rice University

  Author

• Claudia Ziegler Acemyan, PhD

  Rice University

  Author

• Philip Kortum

  Rice University

  Author

Discharge instructions constitute a critical communication link between doctor and patient, and the usability of these instructions is critical. When a patient is discharged from a hospital, the responsibility for care is transferred from the clinical care team to the patient. Discharge instructions describe actions that the patient must perform once they leave the hospital and provide critical information about emergent conditions under which the patient should return for care. These instructions are given to the patient upon discharge, often on physical paper.
The authors of this paper conducted a study examining the impact of three design elements in discharge instructions for college students: 1) the length of the text, 2) the type of images, and 3) the method of generation (pre-printed instructions or physician forms filled in by hand to communicate critical instructions at the time of discharge).
For the population in this study, the results indicated that text length impacted the perceived usability of hospital discharge instructions. There was no evidence of an effect for the factors of image type or method of generation. The findings in this paper provide medical professionals with guidance for creating usable discharge instructions.

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1. Madison Roy, Rice University

   Ms. Roy completed her honors thesis at Rice University, where she recently graduated. She is pursuing a PhD in Industrial Engineering with a concentration in Human Systems Engineering from North Carolina State University. Her work is focused on system usability, workplace safety, and employee training.

2. Claudia Ziegler Acemyan, PhD, Rice University

   Dr. Acemyan is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University and the founding principal of Post Hoc, LLC, a human factors and safety consulting company. Her work focuses on issues such as system usability, safety, human error, warnings and risk communication, medical human factors, assessment tools, and user-centered system development.

3. Philip Kortum, Rice University

   Dr. Kortum is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research focuses on the development of measures of usability and trust, and on creating highly usable systems in the health, mobile, and voting system domains.