A Human Factors and Ergonomics Approach to Understanding the Patient Experience in Emergency Medicine

Patient-centered healthcare experiences continue to remain an elusive goal in Emergency Department (ED) environments. Failures to engage patients remain a costly and deadly problem for patients who are routinely readmitted and fail to understand and follow care instructions. In addition to poor outcomes, patients are often frustrated about wait times and are unclear about how to navigate the ED. These challenges can lead to health problems related to care plan non-adherence, and thereby high costs to both individuals and the healthcare system. Human factors and ergonomics (HFE) is concerned with understanding the needs of humans in complex systems, with the explicit goals of designing more efficient, effective, and safer systems that are suited to human capabilities. In order to develop patient-centered emergency departments, HFE approaches should be used to better understand patient needs, develop patient-centered solutions, and evaluate these solutions for human centeredness. Very little work in the published literature has focused on patient needs in the ED, and an even smaller body of work has used HFE methods for identifying patient needs. In this chapter, we identify the needs for patient-centered EDs, review the existing HFE literature concerning patients in the ED, and present a case study of identifying patient needs in an ED.