Validity and usability of a professional association’s web-based knowledge translation portal: American Physical Therapy Association’s PTNow.org (BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making)

Background: PTNow.org is an evidence-based, on-line portal created by a professional membership association to promote use of evidence in practice and to help decrease unwarranted variation in practice. The site contains synthesis documents designed to promote efficient clinical reasoning. These documents were written and peer-reviewed by teams of content experts and master clinicians. The purpose of this paper is to report on the content and construct validity as well as usability of the site. Methods: Physical therapist participants used clinical summaries (available in 3 formats--as a full description with hyperlinks, “quick takes” with hyperlinks, and a portable two-page version) on the PTNow.org site to answer knowledge acquisition and clinical reasoning questions related to four patient scenarios. They also responded to questions about ease of use related to website navigation and about format and completeness of information using a 1–5 Likert scale. Responses were coded to reflect how participants used the site and then were summarized descriptively. Preferences for clinical description format were analyzed using an analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a Dunnett T3 post hoc analysis. Results: Seventeen participants completed the study. Clinical relevance and completeness ratings by experienced clinicians, which were used as the measure of content validity, ranged from 3.1 to 4.6 on a 5 point scale. Construct validity based on the information on the PTNow.org site was supported for knowledge acquisition questions 66 % of the time and for clinical reasoning questions 40 % of the time. Usability ratings for the full clinical description were 4.6 (1.2); for the quick takes, 3.5 (.98); and for the portable clinical description, 4.0 (.45). Participants preferred the full clinical description over the other two formats (F = 5.908, P = 0.007). One hundred percent of the participants stated that they would recommend the PTNow site to their colleagues. Conclusion: Prelimary evidence supported both content validity and construct validity of knowledge acquisition, and partially supported construct validity of clinical reasoning for the clinical summaries on the PTNow.org site. Usability was supported, with users preferring the full clinical description over the other two formats. Iterative design is ongoing.