health/healthcare

Fun with confusing medication names!

February 2, 2012
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Check out this post from The Consumerist about how unhappy the FDA is with Durezol and Durasal. A hint: It’s ok if you accidentally use Durezol when you wanted Durasal, but the penalty is high for using Durasal instead of Durezol!* This link contains an explanation of the names: When drugs are submitted to the FDA for approval, the Agency carefully screens [...]

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Coming to APA 2011: A Conversation Hour on Use of Electronic Health Records in Clinical Practice

August 2, 2011
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Drs. Kelly Caine (of guest post fame)  and Dennis Morrison will be presenting on human factors considerations for the design and use of electronic health records.  Audience participation is welcome as they discuss this important topic. See abstract below. In this conversation hour we will discuss the use of electronic health records in clinical practice. Specifically, we will focus on [...]

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Treemapping Your Way to Healthier Food Choices

August 2, 2011
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Renee Walker, MFA in Design, came up with an innovative use of treemaps to provide nutrition information – winning the Rethink the Food Label contest. Can you imagine the horror of food companies once they realize how much of their treemap has to say SUGAR? This visualization is certainly easier than the rule of thumb I was taught: “If sugar is [...]

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Resources: Human Factors Design Considerations in Home Health Technology

July 19, 2011

The National Academies of Science and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have just released two publications. The first, Health Care Comes Home, is a 200 page report: Health Care Comes Home reviews the state of current knowledge and practice about many aspects of health care in residential settings and explores the short- and long-term effects of emerging trends and technologies. [...]

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Radiation: The Difficulty of Monitoring the Invisible – Post 2 of 2

April 27, 2011
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This post continues the list of articles on HF-related errors in radiation delivering healthcare devices. As Technology Surges, Radiation Safeguards Lag But the technology introduces its own risks: it has created new avenues for error in software and operation, and those mistakes can be more difficult to detect. As a result, a single error that becomes embedded in a treatment plan can [...]

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Radiation: The Difficulty of Monitoring the Invisible – Post 1 of 2

April 22, 2011
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Lately, I have noticed a plethora of stories on human factors mistakes with medical equipment that delivers radiation. I have collected them here for those who are interested in this problem. At times a computer bug was at fault, but often radiation overdoses came from: inadequate training (and perhaps a poor display, but those are not available for me to examine) non-transferrable mental [...]

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The Human Factors Prize

March 4, 2011

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is announcing the Human Factors Prize, a $10,000 prize recognizing excellent human factors research.  The winner will be presented at the annual meeting in Las Vegas this fall. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is proud to announce the Human Factors Prize, established in 2010 by Editor-in-Chief William S. Marras. The prize, which will be [...]

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False Alarms in the Hospital

February 16, 2011
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NPR pointed me to a two-series in the Boston Globe examining the incessant din of patient alarms. The monitor repeatedly sounded an alarm — a low-pitched beep. But on that January night two years ago, the nurses at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton didn’t hear the alarm, they later said. They didn’t discover the patient had stopped breathing until [...]

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Profiles in Human Factors: Dr. Julian Sanchez, Medtronic

January 25, 2011
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This post is the first in our new series of human factors career profiles. Dr. Julian Sanchez  was kind enough to answer my questions about his job and the journey he took to get there. Dr. Sanchez received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked in a variety of settings, from agricultural technology at Deere [...]

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Children and Medication Errors – “Thanks, Mom and Dad!”

December 3, 2010
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NPR had a story this morning about the high number of medication errors children experience and some ideas as to why. In short summary: Kitchen spoons are inaccurate for giving “teaspoons” of medicine, and it doesn’t take much to give the little ones an overdose. Dose instructions are in teaspoons, but sometimes the cups that come with the bottle are [...]

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“Clomiphene” vs. “Clomipramine”

September 1, 2010
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Found at the Consumerist blog: The words “Clomiphene” and “Clomipramine” might look similar, but if you work in a pharmacy, you should know that they stand for very different things. Clomiphene is the generic version of the fertility drug Clomid. Clomipramine is a tricyclic antidepressant. A woman in Pittsburgh says that the pharmacy at a Giant Eagle grocery store gave [...]

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Too standardized? – The problem of tube identification in hospitals

August 25, 2010
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When it comes to efficiency, creating standard sizes and connections saves money, production efforts, and makes for easy substitution when one runs out of an object. For example, I was delighted that lid for one brand of pot perfectly fit my new frying pan. Unfortunately, there are times when we do not want parts of one object to fit another [...]

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Code Chartreuse – “Too many codes”

August 9, 2010
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Enjoy memorizing this hospital sign! How about just announcing the issue rather than matching it first with a color? For example: “Attention, tornado!” seems like it would be effective. Elopement, by the way, means a patient with Alzheimer’s needs to be located. That makes “purple” a code within a code (and makes me want to watch Inception again). This is [...]

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Human Factors and Health care: Tackling Inefficiencies

July 12, 2010
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I came across two examples of human factors angles in health care. The first is from the NPR show Planet Money.  The show focuses on how much inefficiency and waste there is in medical billing. The whole podcast is worth listening to, but there is one bit that made me laugh out loud (fast-forward to 10:35). Codes (NDC number) are [...]

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Trust & Electronic Medical Records

April 15, 2010
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The Consumerist recently posted on something we haven’t tackled in our posts on electronic medical records: patient trust and privacy. The California HealthCare Foundation recently released the results of a survey on electronic medical records and consumer behavior. The survey found that 15% of people would hide things from their doctor if the medical record system shared anonymous data with [...]

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Doctors Visits Decrease With Electronic Health Records/E-mail

March 12, 2010
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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 [...]

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