Cognitive performance-altering effects of electronic medical records: An application of the human factors paradigm for patient safety

Abstract

According to the human factors paradigm for patient safety, health care work systems and innovations such as electronic medical records do not have direct effects on patient safety. Instead, their effects are contingent on how the clinical work system, whether computerized or not, shapes health care providers' performance of cognitive work processes. An application of the human factors paradigm to interview data from two hospitals in the Midwest United States yielded numerous examples of the performance-altering effects of electronic medical records, electronic clinical documentation, and computerized provider order entry. Findings describe both improvements and decrements in the ease and quality of cognitive performance, both for interviewed clinicians and for their colleagues and patients. Changes in cognitive performance appear to have desirable and undesirable implications for patient safety as well as for quality of care and other important outcomes. Cognitive performance can also be traced to interactions between work system elements, including new technology, allowing for the discovery of problems with "fit" to be addressed through design interventions.

Figure 1

Panel (a) depicts how the error-based patient safety paradigm describes patient safety (“A”) as a product of the “system” (“B”) but does not specify the mechanism between the two, thus leaving a “black box” between A and C. In contrast, panel (b) depicts how the human factors (HF) paradigm (b) proposes a performance mechanism to mediate the relationship between work system and outcomes. Accordingly, while the error-based paradigm fails to offer a specific account of how electronic medical records (EMR) systems affect safety outcomes (panel c), the HF paradigm suggests that the effect of EMR is, first, dependent on its interactions with the wider work system, and second, occurs by way of altering the performance processes of health care providers (panel d).