To Better is Human®

To Better is Human®

The National Center for Human Factors Engineering in Healthcare brings together human factors engineers, industrial systems engineers, industrial/organizational psychologists, usability specialists, health services researchers, and clinicians to conduct safety science, applied research, and consulting to improve healthcare quality, efficiency, reliability, and safety. By being situated within a large healthcare system, our team can take advantage of unusual access to healthcare worker and patient subjects, multiple clinical facilities, multispecialty collaborators, large medical simulation centers, and a usability testing facility.

A part of the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2) and the MedStar Health Research Institute (MHRI), the Center’s home and “research lab” is MedStar Health, a $4B not-for-profit healthcare organization in the Baltimore/Washington area. The MedStar Health system is academically affiliated with Georgetown University School of Medicine, and includes nine hospitals and more than twenty diversified healthcare companies with more than 100 locations. The Center benefits from established collaborations many academic institutions and hospital systems, and MedStar is part of the NIH Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science.


How Does Human Factors Engineering Apply to Healthcare?

Human Factors Engineering is applied to healthcare to design processes, devices, and systems that support the work of care givers in medicine. Specific benefits of Human Factors Engineering and System Safety Engineering applied to healthcare include:

  • Efficient care processes in medical care
  • Effective communication between medical care providers
  • Better understanding of a patient’s current medical condition
  • Implementation of effective and sustainable RCA solutions
  • Reduced risk of medical device use error
  • Easier to use (or more intuitive) devices
  • Reduced risk of health IT-related Use error
  • Easier to use (or more intuitive) health IT
  • Reduced need for training
  • Easier repair and maintenance
  • Cost savings through prevention and mitigation of adverse events
  • Saferworking conditions in medicine
  • Improved patient outcomes

Human Factors Engineeringevaluations and interventions should take place early in the design and system development process. It should include tools such as work domain analysis, function allocation, probabilistic risk assessment, usability testing, among others.

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Upcoming Conferences:

  • Our Center Director Dr. Fairbanks will team up with Jeff Skiles, First Officer of the US Airways Flight 1549, to present plenary presentation “Was It Really a Miracle on the Hudson?” at the National Patient Safety Foundation’s 14th Annual Patient Safety Congress May 24 at the Gaylord National in Washington DC. For more information and to register, go to http://npsfcongress.org.
  • The 2nd International Conference on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare, part of the 4th International Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference 2012, San Francisco CA, July 21-25 2012.
  • Dr. Fairbanks will present at the American Society of Healthcare Risk Management 2012 Annual Conference & Exhibition October 8 in Washington, DC. For more information go to http://www.ashrm.org/.
  • Dr. Fairbanks will present at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists 2012 Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition December 5 in Las Vegas, NV. For more information go to http://http://www.ashp.org/mcm.
  • The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society will host the 2013 Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care, March 11–13 2013 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information click www.hfes.org/web/HFESMeetings.

 

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The National Center for Human Factors Engineering in Healthcare is a collaboration of:

 

News:

  • We are pleased to welcome Angie Hernandez, MS to our team as a Senior Human Factors Specialist. Angie's bio can be found here. She comes with extensive experience with the Department of Defense, including human systems integration and usability.
  • The NCHFEH in collaboration with the Georgetown School of Medicine is currently holding an elective course on Systems Safety and Human Factors Engineering. Eight 4th-year medical students are learning current methods and thinking in how to create safer, better-functioning healthcare systems and how to apply these methods to their future practices.
  • Congratulations to Sarah Parker PhD, who is PI of a newly awarded AHRQ F32 grant. Dr. Parker will be studying methods to measure team coordination and leadership behaviors in the trauma resuscitation setting. The three year study will take place at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center and Childrens National Medical Center. A strong multidisciplinary mentorship team has been gathered, lead by Dr. Terry Fairbanks and Dr. Randy Burd as primary mentors. Other members of the mentorship team include Dr. Deborah Boehm-Davis (GMU), Dr. Doug Wiegmann (Univ. Wisconsin), and Dr. Steven Yule (Harvard). Dr. Jack Sava (Director of Trauma at WHC) will serve as a co-investigator.
  • We are proud to announce the addition of Dr. Sarah Henrickson Parker as a Human Factors Research Scientist. Dr. Parker recently completed her PhD in Industrial & Organizational Psychology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
  • Congratulations to Center faculty member Dr. Zach Hettinger who recently won an ASHRM grant, entitled “An Evidence Based Framework for Root Cause Analysis Safety Solutions.” This project expands on the work of Drs. Terry Fairbanks, Kate Kellogg, and Dr. Hettinger that began at the University of Rochester (funded by EMPSF) and continued at the Washington Hospital Center (funded by the Latham Foundation).
  • Congratulations to Scientific Director Dr. Vicki Lewis (PI) and Director Dr. Terry Fairbanks (Deputy PI) for the recent contract award via CNA for AHRQ’s ACTION 2 Task Order, “Identifying and Aligning Work-System Factors to Reduce Healthcare-Associated Infections.” This project will apply a sociotechnical systems approach to healthcare associated infections in the renal failure population.
  • Congratulations to Dr. Robert Stephens was awarded a grant from the Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation through the Emergency Medicine Foundation for Discovering the Barriers and Facilitators to Timely Disposition of Patients from the Emergency Department
  • One of our Center’s initiatives, using the Hazard Alerting Loop in the SICU setting, gets publicity in the Washington Post
  • Press release announcing the National Center for Human Factors Engineering in Healthcare