Summary
Objectives
The objective of this paper is to define a comprehensible overview of the Human Factors
approach to biomedical informatics applications for healthcare. The overview starts
with a presentation of the necessity of a proper management of Human factors for Healthcare
IT projects to avoid unusable products and unsafe work situations. The first section
is dedicated to definitions of the Human Factors Engineering (HFE) main concepts.
The second section describes a functional model of an HFE lifecycle adapted for healthcare
work situations. The third section provides an overview of existing HF and usability
methods for healthcare products and presents a selection of interesting results. Thelast
section discusses the benefits and limitations of the HF Eapproach.
Methods
Literature review based on Pubmedand conference proceedings in the field of Medical
Informatics coupled with a review of other databases and conference proceedings in
the field of Ergonomics focused on papers addressing healthcare work and system design.
Results
Usability studies performed on healthcare applications have uncovered unacceptable
usability flaws that make the systems error prone, thus endangering the patient safety.
Moreover, in many cases, the procurement and the implementation process simply forget
about human factors: following only technological considerations, they issue potentially
dangerous and always unpleasant work situations. But when properly applied to IT projects,
the HFE approach proves efficient when seeking to improve patient safety, users’ satisfaction
and adoption of the products.
Conclusions
We recommend that the HFE methodology should be applied to most informatics and systems
development projects, and the usability of the products should be systematically checked
before permitting their release and implementation. This requires the development
of Centers specialized in Human Factors for Healthcare and Patient safety in each
Country/Region.
Keywords
Human Factors Engineering - usability - socio-technical approach - healthcare IT applications
- computer-controlled medical devices - patient safety - IT