Moreover, participants’ ability to generate reports of patient history and clinical data in an average of 42.9 and 54.8 seconds, respectively, represents an even more dramatic improvement over existing records systems. Staff members indicated that generating a comprehensive report of the clinical activities over the course of a Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical month or more using the existing paper registers could take up to 15 hours. Interestingly, although the average time needed to locate the appointment using DataPall was very similar in absolute terms between trained and untrained users, the difference in distribution between the two groups is statistically

significant at the p<0.01 level, click here indicating that training played a marginal but negative role on performance. We attribute this unexpected Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical result to the increased caution with which trained users approached the task; their increased knowledge of the program caused them to take additional precautions while using it. The mean SUS of 77.5 lies significantly above the widely accepted threshold of 70 for

a passable product [21]. Moreover, there was not a statistically significant difference between the ratings of trained and untrained users, indicating that training and/or experience with the system has little or no impact on usability assessments. The SUS did present some unique challenges for some Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical participants. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical While all participants spoke English, their native language, Chichewa, lacks grammatical qualifiers which limits the cultural relevancy of a Likert scale. Some participants questioned the difference between “agree” and “strongly agree” (and vice versa for disagree). However, the consistency of survey responses Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical indicates that the confusion did not significantly affect the results of the SUS. The absence of integration of palliative care with existing

health care systems in the majority of sub-Saharan African countries impels palliative care facilities to seek funding independently from donors and granters. However, lack of reliable quantitative statistics documenting the care provided severely curtails the competitiveness of such applications. Moreover, the difficulty associated with maintaining Calpain comprehensive records of care given by palliative care providers underlies the difficulty in developing an evidence base of clinical data for palliative care in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, extant paper records tend to be cumbersome to back-up. DataPall addresses these issues by allowing providers to track the care that they provide for patients and providing a straightforward way to back-up patient data to a computer and to a flash drive. The comprehensive reports generated about the activities of a unit can also assist researchers as they seek to build a stronger evidence base for palliative care in the region.