Improving Quality and Safety through Human Factors Collaborations with Healthcare: The System Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety

摘要

Multiple reports from the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering, (IOM2001; Reid et al., 2005; Kaplan et al., 2013) have called for the use of human factors engineering(HFE) and systems engineering principles and methods/tools to improve health care delivery.Yet, the integration of engineers into health care settings and the education of clinicians and otherhealth care professionals on human factors and systems engineering principles and methods/toolsremain in its infancy. A recent editorial by Xiao and Fairbanks (2011), discusses a small, butgrowing presence of professionals who are “bilingual” in both human factors and medicine.Indeed, Carayon (2011) identified human factors as an innovation that will require diffusion intohealthcare through the use of HFE methods and tools, increasing the health care professionalknowledge of HFE, and the hiring HFEs in healthcare organizations. To achieve the goal ofintegration, there will be many “models” of healthcare – human factors collaborations, fromexperts working together from their different ‘silos’ to true bilingualism. SEIPS, the SystemsEngineering Initiative for Patient Safety (Carayon et al., 2006), aims to integrate human factorsand systems engineering with healthcare disciplines. Our panel of SEIPS-affiliated engineers andhealthcare professionals represents many different types of collaborations across this spectrumand their work spans multiple healthcare settings and disciplines, including: ambulatory primarycare, inpatient pediatrics, community pharmacy, and oncology.