User Persona Creation for a National Electronic Health Record System

Abstract

In the evolving landscape of healthcare digitalisation and specifically the development of patient-centred electronic health record management systems, understanding the users’ needs is crucial to driving the adoption and efficiency of these systems. This work set out to represent the patient users of the German electronic health record system (ePA) by creating relevant and realistic user personas. The created user personas incorporate the users’ digital and health literacy as well as their attitudes towards digitalisation, the healthcare system, and data privacy. The creation of these user personas involved qualitative research combined with the use of generative AI tools. The initial results were then validated by experts in the course of a workshop to address the relevancy and realism of the design artefacts. The insights gathered from the validation served as input for the second iteration of a generative AI-driven user persona generation. This work contributes to the broader understanding of the creation and utilisation of user personas in the context of patient centred electronic health record systems as well as lessons learned regarding the feasibility and applicability of the integration of generative AI in the persona creation and refinement process.