Designing for Risk Assessment Systems for Patient Triage in Primary Health Care: A Literature Review.

Alessandro Jatoba,Paulo Victor Rodrigues Carvalho,Mario Cesar Rodriguez Vidal,Catherine Marie Burns

doi:10.2196/humanfactors.5083

Alessandro Jatoba, Paulo Victor Rodrigues Carvalho + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.2196/humanfactors.5083

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Abstract

BackgroundThis literature review covers original journal papers published between 2011 and 2015. These papers review the current status of research on the application of human factors and ergonomics in risk assessment systems’ design to cope with the complexity, singularity, and danger in patient triage in primary health care.ObjectiveThis paper presents a systematic literature review that aims to identify, analyze, and interpret the application of available evidence from human factors and ergonomics to the design of tools, devices, and work processes to support risk assessment in the context of health care.MethodsElectronic search was performed on 7 bibliographic databases of health sciences, engineering, and computer sciences disciplines. The quality and suitability of primary studies were evaluated, and selected papers were classified according to 4 classes of outcomes.ResultsA total of 1845 papers were retrieved by the initial search, culminating in 16 selected for data extraction after the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria and quality and suitability evaluation.ConclusionsResults point out that the study of the implications of the lack of understanding about real work performance in designing for risk assessment in health care is very specific, little explored, and mostly focused on the development of tools.

Highlights

In health care, patient triage and risk assessment has always been a major concern [1,2,3,4]
We explore the topic of decision-making in patient triage, examining the extent to which empirical evidence supports or contradicts the theoretical hypothesis that formative approaches, such as those commonly included in cognitive engineering approaches, are important for the design for the health care domain
This literature review included original journal papers published in English between 2011 and 2015, including papers available online in 2015

Summary

Introduction

Patient triage and risk assessment has always been a major concern [1,2,3,4]. Keeping patients safe and ensuring that they receive the right treatment has been studied in different research areas such as psychology [5,6], software engineering [7,8], ergonomics [9,10,11], and others These studies of how health care workers make decisions in such complex systems have given some insights into how to design for patient safety. This literature review covers original journal papers published between 2011 and 2015 These papers review the current status of research on the application of human factors and ergonomics in risk assessment systems’ design to cope with the complexity, singularity, and danger in patient triage in primary health care

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Conclusion