Medical professionals engage in an enormous and ever-increasing amount of reading in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which may have adverse impacts on patient care. Personalized readability formats (PRFs) may help to accelerate reading these records, without training, and without adversely affecting comprehension in this critical task. Using History of Present Illness (HPI) reports written by physicians, we investigated how personalized fonts impacted medical text reading speed and comprehension. Crowd-workers without medical training read a set of eighth-grade level passages in six common fonts to determine their fastest and slowest fonts, which were then used to display a set of HPI reports and accompanying comprehension questions. Results showed that PRFs accelerated reading of medical passages by 15% while maintaining comprehension. This finding suggests that individualized information design like PRFs, and specifically font optimization, may be a straightforward way to optimize EHRs through readability. We see a future in which PRFs may help physicians in reading medical information, and look toward future studies investigating PRF impacts on medical professionals’ EHR reading.
Advances in medical technologies and training have been met by universal challenges in safety, efficiency, and effectiveness. The drastic growth and variegation of Healthcare as a field demands greater optimization of medical resources by Human Factors professionals. This study aimed to qualitatively evaluate the entire field of Medical Human Factors since its inception, comprising 1,251 articles across two discipline-specific conferences through keywords related to Healthcare. We analyzed trends in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Proceedings (HFES) from 1974 to 2020 and in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Human Factors in Health Care (HCS) from 2013 to 2020. Results were tabulated, analyzed, and graphed based on their authorial affiliations, funding agencies, countries of research, as well as general content areas and more specific domains over time. Our analyses indicated that Healthcare research has grown exponentially in the past five decades, with 75% of relevant proceedings papers produced since 2010. Gaps in Healthcare literature, directions for future research, and emerging issues related to technologies and training are discussed as well.
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