Providing timely and effective care in the emergency department (ED) requires the management of individual patients as well as the flow and demands of the entire department. Strategic changes to work processes, such as adding a flow coordination nurse or a physician in triage, have demonstrated improvements in throughput times. However, such global strategic changes do not address the real-time, often opportunistic workflow decisions of individual clinicians in the ED. We believe that real-time representation of the status of the entire emergency department and each patient within it through information visualizations will better support clinical decision-making in-the-moment and provide for rapid intervention to improve ED flow. This notion is based on previous work where we found that clinicians' workflow decisions were often based on an in-the-moment local perspective, rather than a global perspective. Here, we discuss the challenges of designing and implementing visualizations for ED through a discussion of the development of our prototype Throughput Dashboard and the potential it holds for supporting real-time decision-making.

No abstract

In critical care environments such as the emergency department (ED), many activities and decisions are not planned. In this study, we developed a new methodology for systematically studying what are these unplanned activities and decisions. This methodology expands the traditional naturalistic decision making (NDM) frameworks by explicitly identifying the role of environmental factors in decision making. We focused on decisions made by ED physicians as they transitioned between tasks. Through ethnographic data collection, we developed a taxonomy of decision types. The empirical data provide important insight to the complexity of the ED environment by highlighting adaptive behavior in this intricate milieu. Our results show that half of decisions in the ED we studied are not planned, rather decisions are opportunistic decision (34%) or influenced by interruptions or distractions (21%). What impacts these unplanned decisions have on the quality, safety, and efficiency in the ED environment are important research topics for future investigation.

Pecha Kucha is a presentation format where presenters are only able to use twenty images to describe their project or a specific topic for a grand total of six minutes and forty seconds. Specifically, the presentation consists of twenty images presented at twenty seconds each. This alternative format forces presenters to provide a focused presentation on their specific topic and creates a means to spark innovation by potentially helping presenters and audience members uncover unexpected ideas together. This session will help push conference participants to consider how UX is used similarly or differently in various Human Factors domains and how to adapt these methods into their own work domain. Our hope is that this session will help display a unique way of participating in an UX Day Challenge Session as well as spark innovation in the Human Factors field. This session continues the mission of using User Experience Day to introduce new session formats to the HFES Annual Meeting and attract User Experience Practitioners.

The use of computers in the workplace is now commonplace. Correspondingly, injuries associated with computer use have increased. However, little research has been done investigating whether these injuries are associated with the software being used. One reason is the difficulty in measuring muscle strain (a predictor of muscle related injuries). Here we present preliminary results of study on the relationship between objective and subjective measures of muscle strain during computer use. As users completed sets of tasks using MSWord ® , SEMG muscle activity was recorded for the muscles associated with using a keyboard and mouse. After each task set, users completed surveys asking the level of strain they experienced during the tasks. Correlations between the measures suggest that subjective measures can provide reliable information regarding the muscle strain associated with software use. These easily obtained subjective measurements could assist in producing software interaction designs that are better for users.