Supporting Situation Awareness and Decision Making in the Health Care Setting

Situation awareness (SA) is critical for effective decision making across a wide swath of medical environments from the primary care setting to the ambulance to the hospital operating room. Over the past 30 years, research on SA across many highly complex and dynamic environments has been conducted on both individuals and teams. This research provides a strong foundation for improving the design of systems to support SA in the healthcare arena.

Although advances in electronic health records (EHR) are enabling access to a greater volume of data than ever before, successful care depends on people’s ability to rapidly capitalize on the vast quantities of available information to support needed decision-making. Current tools that should be supporting SA can easily exceed human cognitive limits and capabilities, and any resulting errors or delays in mentally processing the data to develop an understanding of its significance can easily undermine our goals for improved patient care. The ability to achieve fast and accurate SA in the face of this data overload is a key factor that allows for effective decision-making and information exploitation.

This presentation will focus on defining situation awareness as it relates to the healthcare domain, and will present a model of situation awareness including the factors that act to limit SA and those that allow for people to achieve high levels of SA against these constraints. Based on this model, methods for improving SA in individuals and in teams through a systematic approach for developing user-centered tools will be discussed, along with measures for assessing SA that can be used to validate new technologies. These tools and methodologies provide a strong foundation for improving situation awareness in the healthcare arena.

About the Speaker

Mica Endsley is President of SA Technologies, a cognitive engineering firm, and is the former Chief Scientist for the US Air Force. She has also held the positions of Visiting Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at Texas Tech University.

Dr. Endsley is a Fellow and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She received a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California. Dr. Endsley is a recognized world leader in the design, development and evaluation of systems to support human situation awareness (SA) and decision-making, and the integration of humans and automation. She has authored over 200 scientific articles and is the co-author of Analysis and Measurement of Situation Awareness and Designing for Situation Awareness.

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