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Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality

Improving Patient Safety with Human Factors Methods

Physician looking at a screen

This workshop focuses on the use of human factors engineering methods to identify and mitigate system problems that cause human errors and patient safety hazards in health care. Basic principles and a variety of human factors tools are discussed and demonstrated through hands-on exercises and examples.

As health care delivery processes and technologies become increasingly complex, human factors engineering has proven a powerful approach for proactively reducing harm. These methods can be applied to a range of patient safety improvement efforts, such as identifying design flaws in medical devices, enhancing caregiver-technology interaction, evaluating health information technology solutions, designing less error-prone processes of care, and improving the quality of root-cause analyses.

Topics Covered

  • The importance of human factors in health care
  • Introduction to human factors—overview and application areas
  • A systems approach to investigating and mitigating errors associated with patient and provider safety
  • Human factors engineering and information technology
  • Care provider performance and impact on safety
  • Eliminating/mitigating hazards through human factors
  • Implementation and sustainability issues
  • Methodologies: interviews, observations, task analysis, usability testing, hazard identification and analysis, and more 

Registration

Standard participants: $995 per participant.

Johns Hopkins Medical employees: No cost. Seats are limited.

Please see our Cancellation/No Show & Refund Policy. Beginning January 1, 2021, the No-Show Policy has been reinstated. 

Workshop Objectives

  • Appropriately define the term human factors.
  • Recognize and explain how human factors can be used within high-risk industries such as health care.
  • Apply human factors methods to proactively identify contributing factors of broken systems.
  • Plan an approach to fix the identified factors in the broken system with the goal of reducing human errors and improving organizational performance.

Target Audience

This activity is intended for health care professionals including executives, frontline clinical staff, patient safety specialists, pharmacists, quality improvement professionals, unit-based safety champions, clinical engineers, ergonomists, programmers, biomedical engineers, risk managers, regulatory affairs specialists, government agency personnel, and anyone involved in developing, evaluating, approving or procuring medical devices or health IT systems.

Questions?

Email [email protected].

Accreditation

In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by the Postgraduate Institute for Medicine and Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Postgraduate Institute for Medicine is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education logo

Physician Continuing Medical Education

The Postgraduate Institute for Medicine designates this live activity for a maximum of 14.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Continuing Pharmacy Education

Postgraduate Institute for Medicine designates this continuing education activity for 14.0 contact hour(s) (1.40 CEUs) of the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education.

(Universal Activity Number -JA4008162-9999-19-612-L05-P)

Type of Activity: Application

Continuing Nursing Education

The maximum number of hours awarded for this Continuing Nursing Education activity is 14.0 contact hours.

Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest

Postgraduate Institute for Medicine (PIM) requires instructors, planners, managers, and other individuals who are in a position to control the content of this activity to disclose any real or apparent conflict of interest (COI) they may have as related to the content of this activity. All identified COI are thoroughly vetted and resolved according to PIM policy. PIM is committed to providing its learners with high quality activities and related materials that promote improvements or quality in healthcare and not a specific proprietary business interest of a commercial interest.

Americans with Disabilities Act

Event staff will be glad to assist you with any special needs (i.e., physical, dietary, etc). Please contact Armstrong Institute Learning and Development team prior to the live event at [email protected].