Top 10 Ways to Easily Identify Human Factors Engineering Hazards

Many hospitals and medical device manufacturers are making patient safety a top priority. When medical devices or software have poor usability, they represent latent failures, or accidents waiting to happen. Not only can these latent failures cause harm to the patient, they can also cause injury, unnecessary cognitive workload, and inefficiency for the healthcare worker. Human factors engineering (HFE) principles and methods can assist in finding and fixing these patient safety problems. However, often these methods require expertise in the discipline of HFE. We discuss here 10 simple ways that can be used by HFE novices and experts alike to identify HFE hazards that could otherwise be overlooked.

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