Purpose or Case Report: Demonstrate the breadth and value of integrating a human factors engineer into a pediatric radiology department.
Methods & Materials: Human factors engineering (HF) is the study and development of methods that facilitate performance enhancement, improved safety, and optimized user satisfaction. A core motivation of HF engineering is understanding how the worker performs their work within the constraints of their environment and engineering the work and environment to best suit the worker's capabilities. A secondary but equal motivation is understanding that the human element is inherently fallible and designing the work system to prevent errors from becoming adverse outcomes.
In February 2020, three years after The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) had hired a hospital-wide HF engineer, the radiology department at CHOP recruited a doctoral-level HF engineer into the department's quality and safety team. The HF engineer was assigned to projects as the department needed but also enabled to develop initiatives they felt were necessary. Since then, the engineer has provided research, quality improvement, education, and other consultation for the entire department. We present a selection of project outcomes of the effort.
Results: Our successful HF integration has contributed to several projects with outcomes that impact radiology. In a project looking to improve response time for portable x-ray requests, the clinical teams expected a response within five minutes, coaching the team in applying HF methods, they were able to determine that a realistic promise of response was physically limited to 20 minutes. Observation with scheduling after a cluster of errors provided a foundational report on the mental burden that informed the rebuilding of the entire scheduling workflow. Staging rapid response bins with COVID PPE enabled teams to convert their space and team to safely prepare for an unexpected COVID patient. They participated in a quality improvement project that significantly reduced patient harm-related DR events and facilitated the team in achieving a record 189 days without incident. A virtual ergonomics consultation program for all staff who work from home eased physical pain.
Conclusions: We feel that the value of having HF insight and skillset incorporated into the department has undoubtedly been realized. The integrated HF resource has facilitated faster response to issues and provided insights into department improvement initiatives.