BioPortal™ Application in the Public Health Arena
Abstract. To
better
support the surveillance of infectious disease and epidemic outbreaks
by public health professionals, we designed and implemented
the BioPortal™ system, an
advanced Web-based system for crossjurisdictional information sharing
and integration. In this paper, we report two empirical studies that
evaluate the outcomes, task performance efficiency, user information
satisfaction, and usability associated with BioPortal™. Overall, our
results suggest that the use of BioPortal™ can improve users’
surveillance performance as measured by analysis accuracy and
efficiency (i.e., the amount of time required to complete an analysis
task). Our subjects were highly satisfied with the information support
of BioPortal™ and considered it reasonably usable. Our evaluation
findings show the effectiveness and value of BioPortal™ and, at the same
time, shed light on several areas where its design can be further
improved.
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