Model-Driven Process Guidance to Improve the Safety and Efficiency of Human-Intensive Healthcare Processes

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The research objective of this Advancing Health Services through System Modeling Research project is to develop and evaluate health information technology (IT) interfaces that can be used to guide healthcare providers in real-time as they complete the complex, error-prone blood transfusion process. The researchers will determine how the interfaces should be designed to best help individuals complete the process safely, and to effectively alert and guide individuals when process failures or exceptional situations arise. The researchers will develop and evaluate these interfaces using laboratory-based evaluations and experiments in a realistic clinical setting. This project will establish foundational principles for the design of real-time health IT-based process guidance systems that improve healthcare process safety and efficiency. While health IT has the potential to guide individuals completing complex healthcare processes, it is often inflexible, forcing individuals to perform non-ideal, inefficient, and potentially unsafe processes. This project has the potential to dramatically reduce medical errors by designing health IT interfaces that allow individuals flexibility in the way they complete processes, yet provide enough guidance to maintain a high level of process safety. While this project focuses on the blood transfusion process, the fundamental findings will be generalizable to other complex healthcare processes. Through this project, graduate and undergraduate students will be trained by an interdisciplinary team of engineering, computer science, and nursing faculty members. The process guidance system and interfaces developed and evaluated through this project will be integrated into clinical simulation laboratory exercises used in the university?s nursing education curriculum.