Distinguished Lectures: Two distinguished lectures on medical safety

Speaker: Ayse Gurses, Ant Ozok, Johns Hopkins University
UCL Contact: Jo Iacovides (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 14 Jan 14, 15:00 - 17:00
Venue: Roberts G08
Further Information:

The event is FREE, but please register by 3 January 2014 so we know numbers for the reception. Please register via:

http://tinyurl.com/ofblx85

Abstract

Despite significant advancements in medical technology and surgical techniques, cardiac surgery is still a high risk procedure. We conducted a study to identify and categorize safety hazards (anything that has the potential to cause a preventable adverse patient safety event) in the cardiac operating room using a human factors engineering approach. We used direct observations, complemented by contextual inquiry and photographing, to prospectively identify and classify safety hazards in the cardiac operating room in a multi-site study. An interdisciplinary research team collected data during the 2.5 day site visits to 5 US hospitals. We identified 55 major types of hazards related to the five components (individual, tasks, tools, physical environment, and organization) of the cardiac operating room work system. In this presentation, we will discuss our findings related to hazards in cardiac surgery and discuss our ongoing efforts to improve care for cardiac surgery patients.

Technology Interventions to Improve Medication Adherence among Older Adults

Medication adherence can be defined as taking the right medication at the right time and correct dosage. Lack of medication adherence has been shown to have severe health-related and financial consequences, including being the likely cause of 10% of hospital admissions and 23% of nursing home admissions in the U. S. Older adults living in assisted and independent living facilities can benefit from assistance with the management of their medications especially as their cognitive abilities diminish. To understand medication adherence practices and barriers among older adults and their potential attitudes and potential acceptance of a technology intervention to improve adherence, we developed and implemented 65 older adults in an independent living facility with an age mean of 83 who took on average six prescription medications per day. Our results indicated an average adherence level of 63% among this population, with daily memorized routines being the most common practice to maintain adherence. They had positive attitudes concerning an adherence technology to improve their adherence and thought of it as potentially useful, but did not show much interest in receiving help from their facility for their adherence. The study can inform future studies from a human factors perspective on the development and wide-scale deployment of medication adherence technologies for daily use.

Ayse Gurses, Ant Ozok

Ayse P. Gurses, PhD, is an associate professor in the Armstrong Institute and the Schools of Medicine, Bloomberg Public Health, and the Whiting Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. She obtained her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 2005. Her areas of expertise include human factors engineering, patient safety, health care technology design and implementation, and usability evaluation. She is the recipient of the 2013 Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) Foundation Early Career Investigator Award for her major research contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior during the first 10 years post-PhD. She is also the associate editor of the IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering Socio-Technical System Analysis Department.

Dr. Gurses’s current research efforts focus on improving patient safety in the cardiac operating room, health information technology design and implementation, medical device design and usability evaluation, transitions of care, care coordination, providers’ compliance with evidence-based guidelines, and clinician working conditions. She has extensive experience with working in interdisciplinary research environments and collaborating with clinicians on human-factors related projects. She has been the PI/co-PI on research grants funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, the National Patient Safety Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Gurses has published more than 55 peer-reviewed articles, commentaries, editorials, book chapters, and conference proceedings and gave over 40 invited talks.

Dr A. Ant Ozok

Dr A. Ant Ozok is an industrial engineer with a focus on human factors and a human-computer interaction expert. He is an Associate Professor at the Information Systems Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with joint appointments as an Adjunct Associate Professor within the Department of Anesthesiology and the Division of Health Sciences and Informatics, and as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Armstrong Institute of Patient Safety and Quality, both part of School of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He has over seventeen years of experience in usability testing and design of computer and technology systems in a variety of areas, including health information technologies and medical devices, computer applications, the Web, and mobile technologies.

Dr. Ozok’s research focuses on evaluating and designing technologies with the goal of developing technology interventions for patients/families and clinicians, and within the domains including home care, hospital care, electronic commerce, the Web, cyber-security and education. He has so far conducted laboratory, field and survey studies within the area of human factors and human-centered computing on more than five thousand participants, and has published more than twenty articles in internationally recognized journals. He has led several projects funded by the National Science Foundation and private entities for a total of over one million dollars with topics including technology perceptions among different populations (e.g., high school children and older adults), perceptions of online security, and development of technology interventions to improve medication adherence among older adults. His recent work on medication adherence technologies among the elderly population was sponsored by the Erickson Retirement Communities, and he currently has several joint projects with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the most recent one involving user comprehension and usability issues involving medication co-packages, sponsored by a large drug manufacturer. He was a co-organizer of a workshop on the current and future directions of the human-computer interaction profession which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. He is the associate editor of two international journals and on the editorial boards of several international journals on human-computer interaction. He is also the organizing chair of the Online Communities and Social Computing track of the Human Computer Interaction International conference series.