Clinician cognitive overload

Editor – The October 2018 edition of Future Healthcare Journal includes two editorials and seven articles under the theme ‘Systems approach to healthcare’; healthcare systems engineering (HCSE) for complex adaptive system (CAS) analysis and design – conjoining the disciplines of systems engineering with medicine and healthcare, both academically and in practice.

The HCSE for CAS approach to medical practice and healthcare delivery offers great promise for the much-improved cost-effectiveness of healthcare, but only if the manual- and document-dependent tools and methods described are augmented with state-of-the-art information technology (IT). In this way, not only will the HCSE for CAS potential to achieve cost-effective healthcare improvement be realised but so also will significant opportunities for case outcome optimisation and medical mistake mitigation (medical mistakes being currently the third-leading cause of preventable patient deaths in the United States of America).¹

I posit that because the root cause of medical mistakes is ‘clinician cognitive overload’ created by medical practice requirements executed in chaotic healthcare venues and because traditional medical mistake mitigation methods (eg checklists and other heuristics promulgated by patient safety organisations)^2–4 exacerbate cognitive overload, therefore IT in the form of mobile applications, ‘apps’, is needed to provide real-time and cost-effective cognitive support. Furthermore, healthcare subject matter experts now can create and operate these apps using commercially available cloud-based software solutions known as mobile app development platforms (MADP) as described by the global business analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester.

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