From the category archives:

health/healthcare

Doctors Visits Decrease With Electronic Health Records/E-mail

by Richard Pak
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A study that show that the use of electronic health records (with built-in secure messaging capabilities) can reduce the number of office visits for patients that do not need them.  Office visits are the most expensive form of health care delivery (as noted by the NYT).  No mention of any usability issues, however.
Information about KP HealthConnect (the EHR examined in [...]

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HF Potpourri

by Richard Pak
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Touch Usability’s Kevin Arthur is soliciting input for a presentation he’s doing at UPA
Designing for Human’s Rob Tannen posts an online video of a presentation (ergonomics for interaction designers) he gave at the School of Visual Arts in New York
Edward Tufte will help us understand and track where stimulus funds are going (via Slashdot)
The Internet does not replace health professionals.  [...]

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HF and Medical Device Workshop (again) in April 2010

by Richard Pak

John Gosbee sends along this announcement of an upcoming workshop on medical human factors:
Those readers who want to know more about the practical and regulatory aspects of  human factors and device design might be interested in our workshop (or the approach we use). Our writings and this workshop continue a decades long effort to bring the HF and healthcare worlds [...]

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Similar Medical Bottles Strike Again: Flu Shots and Insulin

by Anne McLaughlin
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One of this blogs most popular posts concerned the similarity of adult and pediatric containers for the blood thinner Heparin.  A story from 2008 concerns the mix up between “nearly identical” bottles of flu vaccine and insulin. When you don’t have high blood sugar, a shot of insulin is serious business and sends you straight to the hospital.
Five Bedford County [...]

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Ahem…your heart has stopped

by Richard Pak
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Darin Ellis sends along this radio story about a woman’s robotic heart that has a malfunction warning system that literally breaks the textbook HF rules of alarm design.  I’ll let Darin explain the unfortunate issue:
This woman, who is living thanks to a robotic heart, related a story of the “heart” malfunctioning.  Apparently, although not prone to malfunction, there is a [...]

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Pain Scale Emoticons

by Richard Pak
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I don’t visit the doctor frequently (less than once a year) but last year I went to the doctor and as part of the paperwork, I encountered a question about how much pain I felt (shown above).
This is the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale (which seems to be available online).  I thought this was a great way to ask about [...]

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Human Factors and Healthcare: The older patient & nurse

by Richard Pak
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I‘ve recently published two papers on the topic of human factors and healthcare. Each paper covers a different “stakeholder”: the older patient and the nurse.  The first paper is available for free but the second paper (a collaboration with my architect colleague Dina Battisto) is available at your local library (or you can request a PDF reprint from me).
Pak, R., [...]

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Medication Adherence Case Study

by Anne McLaughlin
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I talked with an 80 year old man last weekend about how he remembers to take his medication. His solution?
Put all the pills in one bottle and take out what he needs each day. It appears to be an anti-organizer.
If you or your loved ones are more interested in environmental support, a new free application created by Consumer Reports [...]

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Healthcare IT does not save money, increase efficiency

by Richard Pak
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The reasons for widescale introduction of information technology into health care is that: it will reduce costs, and reduce errors. We know that in some cases it may not necessarily reduce errors.  Now we know that it doesn’t necessarily reduce costs.  Harvard researchers examined 4000 “wired” hospitals to determine the effect of widespread adoption of IT in [...]

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HFES Conference Part 6: Health & Human Factors

by Richard Pak

The medical domain is an area where human factors research is very active. Here are some highlights from the conference.
Health Records
The following two presentations/proceedings papers examined Personal Health Records (user-maintained medical records):
Improving the user interface and adoption of online personal health records. (2009).  Peters, K. A., Green, T. F., & Shumacher, R. M.
This paper was a usability evaluation of [...]

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HFES Conference in San Antonio, Part 3 – Health/Internet…and ROBOTS!

by Richard Pak
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One of my major interests at the moment is in the use of technological tools (primarily the Web) in the management of health.  So it was with great pleasure that there was so much research on this topic (I will mention more in future posts).
The first was presented in the Aging session (where Anne was program chair).  Jessie [...]

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Error Leads to Radiation Overdose

by Richard Pak
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Not much detail but the LATimes is reporting that:
“There was a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine . . . ,” officials at the renowned Los Angeles hospital said in a written statement that provided no other details about how the error occurred. “As a result, the use of this protocol resulted in a higher than [...]

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Developing the “science of error measurement”

by Anne McLaughlin

I woke up this morning to the People’s Pharmacy on NPR and an interview with Peter Pronovost (of checklist fame in a previous post) and David Newman-Toker. These two M.D.s hope to inspire research into accurate error measurement as an essential to developing systems that avoid errors in medical diagnosis. The goal of their commentary, published in JAMA, is to [...]

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HF Potpourri

by Richard Pak
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Some interesting items that have passed through my reader:

Jerk can be emulated in software.  Cars with continuously variable transmissions sound and behave differently from other cars.  In this video, the speedometer and RPM smoothly increases (in most cars the RPM would bobble as gears shift and you’d feel a slight jerk).  I don’t know how I reached this page but [...]

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Human Factors Potpourri (again)

by Richard Pak

Here are some more human factors-related items that have crossed my blog reader:

Twitter is hot!  Oprah recently twittered on her show and apparently fell victim to a usability problem:  the update button was non-obvious so she never posted her tweet (Touch usability)
Fellow HFE blog Real World Usability will be posting updates of the Ergonomics Society Conference via Twitter
A night at [...]

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HF/Design/Usability Potpourri from around the Web

by Richard Pak

Here are some links to interesting things from the past few weeks.

Wired reports on user complaints with the new Kindle ebook reader’s text rendering.
Touch Usability’s Kevin Arthur posted a neat behind-the-scenes of how Nokia phones get tested for durability
Smashing Magazine rounded up a list of well-designed tabbed navigation schemes from around the web.  Earlier they also evaluated/redesigned Craigslist [...]

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