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Thursday, September 9, 2010
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Last updated: 08/23/2010
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| Human Factors Engineering for Healthcare Informatics |
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| Founded: 2006 |
| Membership: |
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Goals & Objectives
The IMIA Working Group on Human Factors Engineering in Health Informatics held a symposium at the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in the Sonoma Valley, California on November 12-13, 2009, just prior to the Annual AMIA Symposium in San Francisco.
Presentations and photos are available via the IMIA news website at: http://wp.me/pvCUS-fJ
Daniel Mohrer, from the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Mount Sinai Medical Center, reports on the event that:
At this year's IMIA Working Group on Human Factors Engineering Symposium, held in Sonoma, California on November 12-13, 2009 and hosted by Dr. Peter Elkin and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, twenty-six IMIA members from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, and across the United States assembled to present and discuss novel methods regarding the engineering, implementation and analysis of usable and efficient electronic health systems. This intimate gathering gave participants the opportunity to share ideas and compare the strategies that we employ across the globe.
The first keynote speaker, Dr. Vimla L. Patel, PhD, DSc, FRSC , from the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, discussed the impact of observation studies on efficient information technology integration and simplification of both human-computer interactions and clinical workflows. On day two, Dr. Dag Svanæs, PhD, from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, presented on usability standards and their relevance to Health Informatics, discussing the hardship of quantifying usability and highlighting the positive effects that user-centered design processes may have not only on patient care quality and efficiency, but also on increased safety and security and decreased time and cost of care. Discussions throughout the symposium delved further into these topics and highlighted the necessity of usability standards implementation for health care systems throughout the world.
The student paper/presentation competition was won by Anita Das, a PhD candidate from Trondheim, Norway for her paper entitled "E-health design for self-care management after weight loss treatment". The delightful setting of Sonoma, the southwestern county of California's wine country, added to the success of this two day symposium. In addition to the sixteen presentations on human factors engineering, the attendees enjoyed an evening of fine dining and wine tasting at the beautiful Artesa winery. The IMIA Human Factors Engineering Working Group will be hosting its next meeting in 2011 in Trondheim, Norway in association with Medical Informatics Europe (MIE 2011).
WG objectives:
- To promote methods and techniques devoted to the study of human factors in the field of Biomedical Informatics.
- To coordinate studies and actions in this domain and to develop standardization initiatives for usability studies and user-centered design in the healthcare domain, confronting state of the art methods, models, innovations and results.
- To disseminate rigorous scientific principles for performing formal usability evaluations to improve their degree of efficiency, acceptability and safety of health informatics applications.
- To create standards for the use of HFE and Usability Testing in the certification of EHRs
- To build and maintain a registry of HFE and Usability Tests.
Focus:
Human factors can be the difference between systems that function well in the clinical environment and systems that function poorly. Human factors engineering is the field of study which deals with the cognitive aspects of the human computer interaction. This working group will explore methods for studying the computer-human interaction in health, including regarding optimal interface designs for health informatics software to make the computer a welcome partner with both the clinician and the patient in the empowered longitudinal care of the individual.
Recent activities
A first successful workshop took place in May 2006 in Lille (France), to start the international network in this HF engineering domain. There were 40 attendees from Europe and the United States, and the following day a symposium was held where there were 120 participants. This workshop took the form of basic training and tutorials on usability studies in the Evalab environment, and also explored recent studies on HF related problems in Biomedical Informatics and initiated reflection on usability methods and their adaptation to the specific domain of Biomedical Informatics. A second symposium with 60 participants was held in Rochester, MN, USA on August 23-25th. Discussions centered on the role of human factors and Usability studies on the certification of intelligent electronic health records.
We held a meeting with 109 participants in Aarhus, Denmark in June, 2007 held at Skybe hospital. The meeting by all rights was a complete success. Six or Seven papers are being submitted as a special focus issue in JAMIA. We have all agreed that there are two important next tasks for the working group:
- To create a standard for how HFE and in particular Usability Testing should be employed in the process for certification of electronic health records. We believe this can and will insure more usable and safer EHR systems.
- To create an international registry of Usability studies to hold the topic, scenarios, results and conclusions from the studies. This will enable meta-analyses and minimize the need for repetition of studies to prove the same point.
Future plans:
The working group will develop a research agenda for human factors in health informatics. This work will lead to a white paper by the end of year three or the beginning of year four.
Further, we are planning a business meeting in conjunction with MedInfo2007 and will be working on a program for that meeting with the membership of the Human Factors Engineering in Health Informatics working group.
We will develop a web site with a semantic wiki for furthering discussions; liaise with other IMIA, EFMI and AMIA working groups in the area of human factors and evaluation. We will work on developing sets of standards for the human factors studies needed to certify electronic health records and will develop a research agenda for human factors in health informatics, which will lead to a white paper.
We will develop standards for how HFE and in particular Usability Testing should be used in the certification of Electronic Health Records. This will be developed and balloted in an International Standards Organization.
We will develop and maintain a registry of HFE studies. This will allow collaborators from around the world to learn what their colleagues are doing. Understand the results of studies performed which may limit which studies need to be repeated. This registry we hope will allow metaanalyses to be undertaken to increase the power of such studies to deliver generalizable knowledge.
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Interested in joining this group? Click HERE to enquire.
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