Journal of

---

Background: Nowadays Medical devices have an important role in diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation of patients and also in medical education. However, in the recent years usage and maintenance of these devices have not been in a good situation in developing and even some developed countries. Therefore fundamental changes and reprocessing has begun among management and usability of medical devices in these countries. This research is aimed to determine the management situation with the approach of usability evaluation in order to change and reprocess the management system among Tehran University of Medical Sciences general teaching hospitals at 2012-2013. Materials& Methods: This study was a descriptive and cross sectional research among eight general teaching hospitals of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 1391. The research tool was a self-made check list consisting of 38 questions about medical devices management condition and Nielsen questionnaire about usability of these devices which were completed by head nurses of CCU, ICU and OR departments with the help of medical devices supervisor in 56 departments of these hospitals. Data were collected and analyzed by SPSS software. Results: We found that medical device management and the usability of these devices were not in a good situation in these hospitals as well as usage of electronic information technology. Conclusion: Regarding the results of this research specially in the usability of medical devices, we recommend that users and supervisors of medical devices should be trained about usability criteria and evaluation procedures of these criteria, and the relationship between management styles and applications of quality improvement and pay attention to reprocessing of medical devices management among hospitals administrators and healthcare policy makers to select and purchase the best devices.

---

Background: Physiotherapy information system is one of health information systems which used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of physiotherapy department. Studies have revealed due to usability problems, users' interaction with some information systems is complicated. This study aimed at evaluating users' interaction problems with physiotherapy information system.

Materials and Methods: This study was a cross-sectional and descriptive one which performed using heuristic evaluation method; the users' interaction problems of a physiotherapy system among 105 hospitals were identified, classified and rated based on their severities by three evaluators. Data were gathered using a data collection form designed in Excel software.

Results: In this study, 82 unique interactive problems identified which majority of them 28% (n=23) were related to unconformity of system design with real world conventions with major mean severity of the problems. The lowest numbers were related to the problems including lack of guidance, system documentation and error prevention with major and minor severity respectively.

Conclusion: A number of systems, which are used in many health care centers such as assessed system in this study suffer from several problems which endanger user interaction about the systems can lead to error and patients' harm. To identify and eliminate this type of problems, it is recommend that usability evaluation of these systems to be carried out regularly to enhance users' satisfaction, workflow improvement and patient safety.