Human Factors Design in the Clinical Environment: Development and Assessment of an Interface for Visualizing Emergency Medicine Clinician Workload

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATION

Understanding and managing clinician workload is important both for the occupational health of clinicians and for the safety of patients. This study describes the integration of a new display concept for visualizing emergency medicine physician and nurse workload into a live electronic health record along with an investigation of patient-based drivers of clinician workload. We first present a novel display for visualizing and coordinating clinician workload that has been designed and tested using human factors methods. We then describe the implementation of this display into a live electronic health record. Next, we propose an algorithm of patient-based drivers of clinician workload needed for the display and present the findings of an initial study to validate this algorithm. Evaluation of the algorithm demonstrated that different clinicians have different ways of conceptualizing workload and more sophisticated mechanisms, such as big data mining and machine learning, may be necessary to produce a valid algorithm for calculating clinician workload.

Keywords:

• emergency medicine
• health information technology
• workload management
• workload visualization

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the late Robert L. Wears, MD, PhD, MS to this work. They would also like to thank Rollin J. Fairbanks, MD, MS for his continued leadership and advisement in these efforts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (R01HHS022542) (PI: RJF). Dr Benda was supported by the National Science Foundation’s graduate research fellowship program (1117218).