scholarly journals Informatics and interaction: Applying human factors principles to optimize the design of clinical decision support for sepsis

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 642-651
Author(s):  
Laura Schubel ◽  
Danielle L Mosby ◽  
Joseph Blumenthal ◽  
Muge Capan ◽  
Ryan Arnold ◽  
...  

In caring for patients with sepsis, the current structure of electronic health record systems allows clinical providers access to raw patient data without imputation of its significance. There are a wide range of sepsis alerts in clinical care that act as clinical decision support tools to assist in early recognition of sepsis; however, there are serious shortcomings in existing health information technology for alerting providers in a meaningful way. Little work has been done to evaluate and assess existing alerts using implementation and process outcomes associated with health information technology displays, specifically evaluating clinician preference and performance. We developed graphical model displays of two popular sepsis scoring systems, quick Sepsis Related Organ Failure Assessment and Predisposition, Infection, Response, Organ Failure, using human factors principles grounded in user-centered and interaction design. Models will be evaluated in a larger research effort to optimize alert design to improve the collective awareness of high-risk populations and develop a relevant point-of-care clinical decision support system for sepsis.

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Ayesha Aziz ◽  
Lance Pflieger ◽  
Nathaniel O’Connell ◽  
Joshua Schiffman ◽  
Brandon M. Welch

Purpose To evaluate the potential of implementing established family cancer guidelines as clinical decision support within meaningful use (MU)–compliant health information technology systems. Methods We conducted a systematic analysis of cancer guidelines involving family health history (FHx) published before 2015. By comparing existing cancer guideline statements to current MU FHx standard requirements, we determined whether the cancer guideline statements could be implemented as clinical decision support. For guidelines that could not implemented, we determined the primary reasons for incompatibility. Results A total of 531 statements from 55 guidelines published by 11 different organizations were reviewed and analyzed. Overall, 18% to 66% of guideline statements could or could not be implemented in MU-compliant health information technology systems, depending on which MU standard was used. Health Level Seven (HL7) models performed better than SNOMED models. Implementability of guideline statements varied by cancer type and guideline organizations. The greatest deficiencies in implementability of statements were largely a result of the fact that MU standards required only first-degree relatives and that FHx terms used in guidelines statements were ambiguous. Conclusion FHx cancer guidelines and MU-based systems vary widely and are mostly incompatible. We identified sources of incompatibility and made recommendations that could improve the implementability of FHx cancer guidelines. Our findings and recommendations can enhance the use of established FHx cancer risk guidelines in routine clinical workflows.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 511-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Haux ◽  
C. U. Lehmann

SummaryBackground: In 2009, the journal Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI) commenced publication. Focused on applications in clinical informatics, ACI was intended to be a companion journal to Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM). Both journals are official journals of IMIA, the International Medical Informatics Association.Objectives: To explore, after five years, which congruencies and interdependencies exist in publications of these journals and to determine if gaps exist. To achieve this goal, major topics discussed in ACI and in MIM had to be analysed. Finally, we wanted to explore, whether the intention of publishing these companion journals to provide an information bridge from informatics theory to informatics practice and from practice to theory could be supported by this model. In this manuscript we will report on congruencies and interdependencies from practise to theory and on major topis in ACI. Further results will be reported in a second paper.Methods: Retrospective, prolective observational study on recent publications of ACI and MIM. All publications of the years 2012 and 2013 from these journals were indexed and analysed.Results: Hundred and ninety-six publications have been analysed (87 ACI, 109 MIM). In ACI publications addressed care coordination, shared decision support, and provider communication in its importance for complex patient care and safety and quality. Other major themes included improving clinical documentation quality and efficiency, effectiveness of clinical decision support and alerts, implementation of health information technology systems including discussion of failures and succeses. An emerging topic in the years analyzed was a focus on health information technology to predict and prevent hospital admissions and managing population health including the application of mobile health technology. Congruencies between journals could be found in themes, but with different focus in its contents. Interdependencies from practise to theory found in these publications, were only limited.Conclusions: Bridging from informatics theory to practise and vice versa remains a major component of successful research and practise as well as a major challenge.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (01) ◽  
pp. 120-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Nohr ◽  
E. Borycki ◽  
A. Kushniruk

SummaryA wide range of human factors approaches have been developed and adapted to healthcare for detecting and mitigating negative unexpected consequences associated with technology in healthcare (i.e. technology-induced errors). However, greater knowledge and wider dissemination of human factors methods is needed to ensure more usable and safer health information technology (IT) systems. Objective: This paper reports on work done by the IMIA Human Factors Working Group and discusses some successful approaches that have been applied in using human factors to mitigate negative unintended consequences of health IT. The paper addresses challenges in bringing human factors approaches into mainstream health IT development. Results: A framework for bringing human factors into the improvement of health IT is described that involves a multi-layered systematic approach to detecting technology-induced errors at all stages of a IT system development life cycle (SDLC). Such an approach has been shown to be needed and can lead to reduced risks associated with the release of health IT systems into live use with mitigation of risks of negative unintended consequences. Conclusion: Negative unintended consequences of the introduction of IT into healthcare (i.e. potential for technology-induced errors) continue to be reported. It is concluded that methods and approaches from the human factors and usability engineering literatures need to be more widely applied, both in the vendor community and in local and regional hospital and healthcare settings. This will require greater efforts at dissemination and knowledge translation, as well as greater interaction between the academic and vendor communities.


Author(s):  
Jason J. Saleem ◽  
Kyle Maddox ◽  
Jennifer Herout ◽  
Kurt Ruark

This practice-oriented paper presents a human-centered design (HCD) framework that we developed to perform a comprehensive evaluation of a new health information technology (HIT) system under development, intended to replace a legacy system. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veteran Crisis Line (VCL) program provides a vital service in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. VCL staff rely on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) legacy system, Medora. VCL intended to replace Medora with Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) CRM system. Due to wide-spread criticism of D365, the VA Human Factors Engineering (HFE) team engaged in a multi-study, mixed-method HCD evaluation to investigate the legacy system and intended replacement in terms of ability to support VCL staff needs. The HCD framework we developed to perform this evaluation may be adapted for other large-scale HIT transitions and may provide human factors practitioners with guidance to make evidence-based decisions to support (or abandon) such transitions.


10.2196/17512 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. e17512
Author(s):  
Ever Augusto Torres Silva ◽  
Sebastian Uribe ◽  
Jack Smith ◽  
Ivan Felipe Luna Gomez ◽  
Jose Fernando Florez-Arango

Background Displeasure with the functionality of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) is considered the primary challenge in CDSS development. A major difficulty in CDSS design is matching the functionality to the desired and actual clinical workflow. Computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs) are used to formalize medical knowledge in clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) in a computable language. However, existing CIG frameworks require a specific interpreter for each CIG language, hindering the ease of implementation and interoperability. Objective This paper aims to describe a different approach to the representation of clinical knowledge and data. We intended to change the clinician’s perception of a CDSS with sufficient expressivity of the representation while maintaining a small communication and software footprint for both a web application and a mobile app. This approach was originally intended to create a readable and minimal syntax for a web CDSS and future mobile app for antenatal care guidelines with improved human-computer interaction and enhanced usability by aligning the system behavior with clinical workflow. Methods We designed and implemented an architecture design for our CDSS, which uses the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and a knowledge engine in the MVC architecture based on XML. The knowledge engine design also integrated the requirement of matching clinical care workflow that was desired in the CDSS. For this component of the design task, we used a work ontology analysis of the CPGs for antenatal care in our particular target clinical settings. Results In comparison to other common CIGs used for CDSSs, our XML approach can be used to take advantage of the flexible format of XML to facilitate the electronic sharing of structured data. More importantly, we can take advantage of its flexibility to standardize CIG structure design in a low-level specification language that is ubiquitous, universal, computationally efficient, integrable with web technologies, and human readable. Conclusions Our knowledge representation framework incorporates fundamental elements of other CIGs used in CDSSs in medicine and proved adequate to encode a number of antenatal health care CPGs and their associated clinical workflows. The framework appears general enough to be used with other CPGs in medicine. XML proved to be a language expressive enough to describe planning problems in a computable form and restrictive and expressive enough to implement in a clinical system. It can also be effective for mobile apps, where intermittent communication requires a small footprint and an autonomous app. This approach can be used to incorporate overlapping capabilities of more specialized CIGs in medicine.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Rogier van de Wetering

Modern hospitals increasingly make use of innovations and information technology (IT) to improve workflow and patient’s clinical journey. Typical innovative solutions include patient records and clinical decision support systems to enhance the process of decision making by doctors and other healthcare practitioners. However, currently, it remains unclear how hospitals could facilitate and enable such a decision support capability in clinical practice. We ground our work on the resource-based view of the firm and put forth the notion of IT-enabled capabilities which emphasizes critical IT investment and capability development areas that hospitals could exploit in their quest to improve clinical decision support. We develop a research model that explains how “health information exchange” and enhanced “information capability” collectively drive a hospital’s “clinical decision support capability.” We used partial least squares path modeling on large-scale cross-sectional data from 720 European hospitals. Outcomes suggest that health information exchange positively impacts information capability. In turn, information capability complementary partially mediates the relationship between information exchange and clinical decision support. Hence, this research contributes to the literature on clinical decision support and provides valuable insights into how to support such innovative technologies and capabilities in clinical practice. We conclude with a discussion and conclusion. Also, we outline the inherent limitations of this study and outline directions for future research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 125-132
Author(s):  
R. A. Jenders

Summary Introduction: Advances in clinical decision support (CDS) continue to evolve to support the goals of clinicians, policymakers, patients and professional organizations to improve clinical practice, patient safety, and the quality of care. Objectives: Identify key thematic areas or foci in research and practice involving clinical decision support during the 2015-2016 time period. Methods: Thematic analysis consistent with a grounded theory approach was applied in a targeted review of journal publications, the proceedings of key scientific conferences as well as activities in standards development organizations in order to identify the key themes underlying work related to CDS. Results: Ten key thematic areas were identified, including: 1) an emphasis on knowledge representation, with a focus on clinical practice guidelines; 2) various aspects of precision medicine, including the use of sensor and genomic data as well as big data; 3) efforts in quality improvement; 4) innovative uses of computer-based provider order entry (CPOE) systems, including relevant data displays; 5) expansion of CDS in various clinical settings; 6) patient-directed CDS; 7) understanding the potential negative impact of CDS; 8) obtaining structured data to drive CDS interventions; 9) the use of diagnostic decision support; and 10) the development and use of standards for CDS. Conclusions: Active research and practice in 2015-2016 continue to underscore the importance and broad utility of CDS for effecting change and improving the quality and outcome of clinical care.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 1091-1104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirza Mansoor Baig ◽  
Hamid GholamHosseini ◽  
Aasia A Moqeem ◽  
Farhaan Mirza ◽  
Maria Lindén

Supporting clinicians in decision making using advanced technologies has been an active research area in biomedical engineering during the past years. Among a wide range of ubiquitous systems, smartphone applications have been increasingly developed in healthcare settings to help clinicians as well as patients. Today, many smartphone applications, from basic data analysis to advanced patient monitoring, are available to clinicians and patients. Such applications are now increasingly integrating into healthcare for clinical decision support, and therefore, concerns around accuracy, stability, and dependency of these applications are rising. In addition, lack of attention to the clinicians’ acceptability, as well as the low impact on the medical professionals’ decision making, are posing more serious issues on the acceptability of smartphone applications. This article reviews smartphone-based decision support applications, focusing on hospital care settings and their overall impact of these applications on the wider clinical workflow. Additionally, key challenges and barriers of the current ubiquitous device-based healthcare applications are identified. Finally, this article addresses current challenges, future directions, and the adoption of mobile healthcare applications.


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