Comparison of two heuristic evaluation methods for evaluating the usability of health information systems

[Display omitted] •Checklist heuristic evaluation (HE) method finds more problems.•Usual heuristic evaluation method could find problems with higher severities.•Checklist should be used with caution for evaluating mission-critical systems. In addition to following the usual Heuristic Evaluation (HE) method, the usability of health information systems can also be evaluated using a checklist. The objective of this study is to compare the performance of these two methods in identifying usability problems of health information systems. Eight evaluators independently evaluated different parts of a Medical Records Information System using two methods of HE (usual and with a checklist). The two methods were compared in terms of the number of problems identified, problem type, and the severity of identified problems. In all, 192 usability problems were identified by two methods in the Medical Records Information System. This was significantly higher than the number of usability problems identified by the checklist and usual method (148 and 92, respectively) (p