Critical Care Technology – Can't Live with It…Can't Live without It

The proposed Macroergonomics and Patient Safety panel will address the particular challenges of technology in critical care and emergency medicine and patient safety. Critical care technology remains a driving force in American health care facilities, yet little human factors and systems engineering information is available to improve the design and implementation of these technologies. Given the complexity of the clinical technology and the intricacy of modern critical and emergent medical care, human factors (HF) and macroergonomic analysis (MA) are especially important in the design, implementation, and use of the various technologies. HF and MA should be used to better understand the challenge of developing multi-perspective evaluations for this technology. The panel of experts' presentations and the discussion to follow will address current problems and patient safety and integration of critical technologies.