Interfacing Safety and Communication Breakdowns: Situated Medical Technology Design

Safety-critical medical work requires an error-minded approach for design of the technologies that support its processes. We define the requirements that such a framework should meet and propose ICAD – an adverse-event minded design approach for high-risk eHealth applications that considers users, joint activity processes, the distributed computer-supported medical setting, and the workflow areas that allow for communication and coordination breakdowns to occur. We leverage knowledge for human error analysis during the task-modeling stages from other safety-critical domains, and expand the focus of analysis to integrate complex joint activity aspects and to account for the role of technology, both as a medium and as an interactor. The outcome of our technique is design and workflow solutions that prevent accidents, a priori.