Design, development, and evaluation of a registry system for hyperbaric oxygen therapy: A methodological study.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), utilizes 100% oxygen at pressures greater than sea-level atmospheric pressure, for the treatment of conditions in which the tissues starve for oxygen. The Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) has granted HBOT approval for the treatment of various conditions. On the other hand, applying informatics registry systems can improve care delivery, ameliorate outcomes, and reduce the costs and medical errors for the patients receiving HBOT treatment. Therefore, we aimed to design, develop, and evaluate a registry system for patients undergoing HBOT.

METHODS

In the first phase, the conceptual and logical models were designed after conducting symposiums with experts and having other experts review the models. In the second phase, the system was developed on the web using ASP.NET  and C# programming languages frameworks. The last phase involved Nielsen's heuristic evaluation method for the system's usability. Five experts evaluated the system, including three health information management specialists and two medical informatics specialists.

RESULTS

The hyperbaric patient information registry system (HPIRS) interacts with three types of users-a specialist physician, a nurse, and a system administrator. A scenario for each predefined activity was designed, and all the information was stored in the SQL servers. The five experts independently found 152 issues, of which 84 were duplicates. The 68 distinct issues of the system were then resolved.

CONCLUSIONS

The design and development of such registry systems can make data available and stored carefully to improve clinical care and medical research and decrease costs and errors. These registries can provide the healthcare systems with E-health applications, improved data management, more secure data transfer, and support for statistical reporting. The implemented heuristic evaluation method can also provide a low-cost and readily available system to fix the issues of the designed systems.