Patient-centered design of an information management module for a personally controlled health record.

Background: The development of health information technologies should be informed by iterative experiments in which qualitative and quantitative methodologies provide a deeper understanding of the abilities, needs, and goals of the target audience for a personal health application.

Objective: Our objective was to create an interface for parents of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity/disorder (ADHD) to enter disease-specific information to facilitate data entry with minimal task burden.

Methods: We developed an ADHD-specific personal health application to support data entry into a personally controlled health record (PCHR) using a three-step, iterative process: (1) a needs analysis by conducting focus groups with parents of children with ADHD and an heuristic evaluation of a prerelease version of a PCHR, (2) usability testing of an initial prototype personal health application following a "think aloud" protocol, (3) performance testing of a revised prototype, and (4) finalizing the design and functionality of the ADHD personal health application.