User satisfaction of general practitioners with HIOS+, a medical decision support system.

In this article, a user satisfaction study is described. The Formal Interpreter (FI) and the Free-text Formalizer (FF) are modules of the medical DSS HIOS+. With FF, medical experts can formalize topics selected from free-text ICHPPC-II-defined criteria into queries. FI gives decision support to GPs in their daily work by interpreting queries belonging to entered ICPC codes and presenting advice/warnings concerning the validity (correctness) of the diagnoses in patient cases. In the study, FI was used in field and laboratory test situations by GPs. User satisfaction was assessed using questionnaires consisting of an adapted version of the Bailey questionnaire. Answers given were analysed using Bailey's approach and the 'two-sample t-test'. The most important result of the FI evaluation was that users given active decision support were more satisfied with FI than users given none or only textual decision support.