Design and evaluation of a web-based personal health record for patients under dialysis

Background: In the end stages of chronic kidney disease, patients need kidney replacement therapy, such as dialysis and transplantation. Self-care and self-management are essential in dialysis patients at this stage. One of the tools that can facilitate self-management for patients is Personal Health Records (PHRs). This study aimed to design, develop and evaluate a PHR for patients under dialysis. Materials and methods: In this study, a PHR was developed in three phases. In the first phase, the minimum data set for the PHR was determined by literature review as well as surveys of patients and experts. In the second phase, the PHR was designed by the PHP web programming language. In the third phase, the usability of designed system was evaluated by the heuristic evaluation method. Results: Literature review and surveys of patients and experts led to the identification of 17 main data sets. In this study, 114 fields were created through 41 tables in the MySQL database. After evaluating the designed system, 26 unique problems were identified. The highest percentage of problems with 19% (n = 5) was related to “error prevention”. Conclusions: The designed PHR for patients undergoing chronic dialysis had satisfactory usability. Therefore, this web-based system can be efficiently used for the disease management of dialysis patients.