Medical Informatics: What Contributions can Human Factors Make?

Healthcare is arguably the most complex of the complex, sociotechnical systems studied by the human factors community. This complexity only looks to increase over the next five years as massive changes in how care is delivered and reimbursed are already underway. Not the least of these changes is the not-so-subtle introduction of medical informatics and their corresponding ripple effects on how roles are designed, how work is coordinated, how primary and more distant personnel are impacted, and how power is allocated among groups. Much of the activity in medical informatics is conducted without representation by the human factors community, or even knowledge of what the human factors community can contribute other than usability testing methods. In this panel, a group of leading human factors researchers will provide a range of perspectives to the question: What contributions can human factors make to medical informatics based upon recent cutting-edge research and reflection on past experiences.