Real-Time Occupational Stress and Fatigue Measurement in Medical Imaging Practice

While occupational stress and fatigue have been well documented as a source of medical error, current medical practice largely leaves individual healthcare providers to their own device. With the exception of recently established rules limiting the number of hours physicians in training can work (to counteract errors related to sleep deprivation), few regulations exist addressing occupational stress and fatigue in medicine. In some clinical arenas, fatigue countermeasure programs have been studied, but have rarely been implemented on a larger scale [1]. Generally, an individual provider is expected to consistently operate at high levels of efficiency regardless of workload and task complexity. In addition to physiologic, emotional, and cognitive fatigue encountered throughout medicine, radiologists are also subject to visual fatigue due to prolonged periods of time interpreting complex medical imaging datasets on computers. Collectively, these different types of fatigue have the potential to adversely affect radiologist performance and lead to medical errors. Effective counter-measures require some sort of objective analysis at the point of care, which can record fatigue indicators in a standardized fashion, correlate these measures with baseline data specific to the individual end-user and task being performed, and present real-time feedback for the purpose of performance improvement and education.