Communicating Level of Certainty Associated with Human Factors Findings and Recommendations in Healthcare

While there is a need for human factors engineering (HFE) in health systems design, the pace of operations in most healthcare systems often requires deviation from optimal HFE practices. We must provide sufficiently useful and usable findings to the design team and stakeholders to support project decisions while also tempering their expectations and properly calibrating their level of certainty around the findings and recommendations. As members of an HFE team in a series of projects related to the implementation of a new electronic health record (EHR) in a large healthcare system, we describe some early efforts with project teams and initial missteps that limited the effectiveness of HFE work. We also describe communication strategies we are piloting that appear to achieve better results in terms of project team engagement, stakeholder buy-in, and validity and utility of findings.