Human Factors and Organizational Issues in Health Informatics: Review of Recent Developments and Advances

Abstract

Objective: In this paper we focus on a review of key articles published in the past two years (2022 and 2023) in the areas of human factors and organizational issues in health informatics.

Methods: We reviewed manuscripts that were published in primary human factors, human factors engineering and health informatics journals. This involved conducting a series of searches using PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for articles related to human factors in healthcare published in 2022 and 2023.

Results: The range of applications that have been designed and analyzed using human factors approaches has been rapidly expanding, including increased number of articles around topics such as the following: AI in healthcare, patient-centered design, usability of mHealth, organizational issues, and work around ensuring system safety. This includes study of applications designed for use by both patients and health providers applying both qualitative and quantitative approaches to user requirements, user-centered system design and human factors analysis and evaluation.

Conclusion: The importance of human factors is becoming recognized as new forms of health technology appear. A multi-level perspective on human factors, that considers human factors at multiple levels, from the individual user to the complex social and organizational context, was described to consider the range and diversity of human factors approaches in healthcare. Such an approach will be needed to drive the design and evaluation of useful and usable healthcare information technologies.