Drawing on human factors engineering to evaluate the effectiveness of health information technology

摘要

There are substantial global investments being made in health information technology as governments and providers strive to improve the safety, quality and efficiency of healthcare.1 Accompanying this trend is a growing health information technology industry projected to be worth around $230 billion by 2020, with a range of new applications becoming available daily.2 These vary significantly in complexity, ranging from foundational technologies that impact on a range of care providers (e.g. electronic health records) to relatively discrete functionality affecting a limited range of settings and users (e.g. specialist apps for patients with chronic conditions) (see Box 1).