Healthcare systems increasingly rely on technology to deliver safe patient care. However, new technologies can create unique and unexpected – even unprecedented – challenges by interrupting and altering established practices, processes, workflow, and increasing clinicians’ cognitive workload. In such an environment, adverse events are often a result of a mismatch between the design of the technology and users’ intentions, or how the technology disrupts workflow, rather than simple human error. Dozens of common issues exist, such as alarm fatigue and pump programming errors for example, that demonstrate how patient safety can be seriously impacted by the complex decisions clinicians are forced to make when using new technologies.
In this episode we discuss the science of human factors engineering in the design and implementation of technology in the healthcare environment.
Our guests:
• Yuval Bitan, PhD, Cognitive technologies Laboratory at the University of Chicago and HumanEra, University Health Network
• Mark Fan, MASc, HumanEra, University Health Network
• Andrea Cassano-Piché, PEng, MASc, HumanEra, University Health Network
Resources:
Around the patient bed – By Yoel Donchin