- Following the pattern established by the scoring of the established, pan-industry, Systems Usability Scale (SUS) 8, the questions are scored against a 5-point scale:
Agree Strongly - Agree - Don’t Know - Disagree - Disagree Strongly
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The ‘axis’ of the questions is alternated in order to try to vary the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ attitude that the question could be seen to have.
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The questions were created by the members of the CCIO and CIO Networks, during a plenary session at DHI CCIO Summer School 2015, and in ensuing discussions on this thread.
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In my opinion, the software reduces the risk of clinical error. (positive)
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Effective support for this software is hard to access in a clinically-appropriate timescale. (negative)
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In my opinion, the software improves the quality of clinical care I can provide. (positive)
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The quality of the interaction/consultation with the patient is adversely affected by the use of this software. (negative)
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Using the software gives me the key information I need on patient’s history, diagnosed conditions and current care and treatment plan. (positive)
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Each question scores from 0 to 4 points, where 0 signifies a trait of the least usable system and 4 signifies a trait of the most usable system. Clearly, because the ‘axis’ of the questions is alternated, the mathematics of the scoring must be alternated too. It makes the scoring a little bit complicated, again this is how it’s done is the SUS so we followed suit.
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The points are summed to give a total for the cSUS score in which the minimum score is 0 and the maximum score is 20. They are then multiplied by a factor of 2.5 to give a score ranging from 0 to 50. The authors of SUS felt it necessary to include this multiplication step, which I believe is an unnecessary complication (and in fact, for those authors, resulted in completely avoidable confusion as to whether the SUS is a percentage 8), but we followed them in doing so in order to maintain compatibility/parity of weighting between SUS and cSUS.
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In total therefore we end up with a SUS score out of 100 and a cSUS score out of 50. The total score for the combined survey is 150.
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If you have any feedback or ways to improve the questions or methodology, then this would be a good place to discuss it. If making a suggestion to improve on of the questions, please supply a suggested alternative form of words, rather than just making a comment about the existing form of words.
- cSUS on openhealthhub.org
- cSUS on Medium
- [cSUS Webinar on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/166190203 18)
- cSUS on Twitter
Clinical Software Usability Scale (cSUS) by Dr Marcus Baw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
