Abigail Wooldridge

• PhD, Master of Science, Master of Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Traditional approaches to improve teamwork during postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) may not be effective for dynamic situations with fluid team members. In this study, we use the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model as a framework to identify strategies to improve the teamwork of fluid teams managing PPH. We administered a clos...

Background/Objectives: Maternal mortality occurs at alarming rates in the United States. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births—double that of other high-income countries, including France and Canada. Postpartum hemorrhage (i.e., excessive blood loss during delivery or within the 24 h following) is a leading cause of matern...

Ergonomics and Human Factors (E/HF) practitioners are increasingly engaged in projects meant to centre underserved communities and reduce inequities. The subdiscipline of E/HF that has emerged to explore the application of E/HF in this way is called community ergonomics. In this qualitative-descriptive study, we reflect on the progress made in the...

Deaths resulting from maternal hemorrhage (MH), for example, excessive blood loss related to childbirth, are preventable if the hemorrhage is identified in a timely manner. One approach to support timely identification is the use of alerts. However, alerts with low utility have negative, unanticipated consequences for both clinician and patient out...

Handoffs, that is, care transitions, convey information, responsibility, and authority between care providers. Intraoperative handoffs, which occur during surgery either due to shift changes or breaks, are high-risk, error-prone and linked with inadequate verbal communication and documentation. We explored perspectives about safety and quality of i...

To truly design for people—addressing the full spectrum of human capacities and limitations—it is critical that the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) fosters a welcoming and inclusive environment for HF/E professionals and students of diverse backgrounds and experiences. It is essential that HFES, like any other organization, considers ho...

Medication and equipment must be located and retrieved quickly during resuscitation to ensure good patient outcomes; code carts are often used to store commonly used items and may be standardized to support faster retrieval. An augmented reality (AR) application to teach clinicians about the contents and organization of a standardized pediatric cod...

Diagnostic laboratories have faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, being under immense pressure to maintain workplace safety while remaining operational and providing the best quality of diagnostic testing. In this study, we analyzed the work system (WS) elements impacting the burnout of three health care professionals (HCPs)...

As pediatrics hospitalists, we care for a diverse population of hospitalized children with increasing acuity and complexity in large, multidisciplinary medical teams. In this Method/ology paper, we summarize how human factors engineering (HFE) can provide a framework and tools to help us understand and improve our complex care processes and resulti...

Teams are critical in developing effective responses to various disasters and crises. This study defines a new type of response team: a disaster intervention development team, charged with rapidly developing emergent and innovative interventions to aid disaster response. In this case study, we analyzed the SHIELD Enterprise, a disaster intervention...

Burnout is an occupational syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress not appropriately managed. In nursing, burnout has been associated with adverse job characteristics (e.g., high responsibility for others, heavy workload, lack of infrastructure), with negative outcomes for the individual, the organization, and the recipients of care. The o...

Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) is recognized as crucial to addressing societal challenges that are systemic in nature, including issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. The Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) recently issued a guidance outlining how HFE can help address DEI issues, in line with the Annual Meeting acti...

Health care professionals (HCPs) are frequently exposed to Human Factors/Ergonomics (HFE) issues that result in stress, adversely affecting their health and negatively impacting the quality of care. Chronic stress can result in burnout, with negative implications for individuals, health care organizations, and patients. Current approaches to monito...

Objective This study investigates how team cognition occurs in care transitions from operating room (OR) to intensive care unit (ICU). We then seek to understand how the sociotechnical system and team cognition are related. Background Effective handoffs are critical to ensuring patient safety and have been the subject of many improvement efforts....

Objective: We explore relationships between barriers and facilitators experienced by users to understand dynamic interactions in sociotechnical systems and improve a mobile phone-based augmented reality application that teaches users about the contents of a standardized pediatric code cart. Background: Understanding interactions between performa...

Background As problems of acceptance, usability and workflow integration continue to emerge with health information technologies (IT), it is critical to incorporate human factors and ergonomics (HFE) methods and design principles. Human-centered design (HCD) provides an approach to integrate HFE and produce usable technologies. However, HCD has bee...

Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE), with the goal to support humans through system design, can contribute to responses to emergencies and crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe three cases presented at the 21st Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association to demonstrate how HFE has been applied during the C...

This symposium proposes that Participatory Quantitative Ethnogra-phy (PQE) is an important new strand of research for the QE community to develop. This paper introduces the participatory research values motivating PQE, outlines contributions from symposium speakers explaining the importance of PQE from different perspectives, before closing with a...

While care transitions influence quality of care, less work studies transitions between hospital units. We studied care transitions from the operating room (OR) to pediatric and adult intensive critical care units (ICU) using Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS)-based process modeling. We interviewed twenty-nine physicians (sur...

Food and nutrition are important to ensuring health, and practices related to food (including obtaining, preparing, consuming, sharing and cleaning up food) involve effortful activity - work. Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) efforts that leverage expertise in across HF/E domains (i.e., physical, cognitive and organizational ergonomics) can provi...

Diversity and inclusivity are important, with demonstrated impact on numerous outcomes, including breadth, creativity, and innovation of work as well as satisfaction and commitment to organizations. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Diversity and Inclusion Committee is charged with increasing diversity and inclusiveness within the soc...

Effective teams are essential to meet the complex and dynamic requirements during pandemic response. This case study analyses the work system of mobileSHIELD, a distributed team developing a diagnostic test in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted interviews with 18 team members to understand how work system design influences the use of t...

Marginalized people are disproportionately harmed by systemic social inequities; human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) professionals can address these systemic issues by developing and implementing equitable and just practices. To identify practical steps to transform ergonomic practice, we thematically analyzed two group discussions from a session f...

Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) is a systems discipline focused on jointly optimizing human well-being and overall system performance. Societal problems, including but not limited to health inequity, racism, poverty, and (lack of) sustainability, are inherently systems problems that involve humans, and so recent work has argued that HF IE can and s...

An augmented reality (AR) mobile smartphone application was developed for clinicians to improve their knowledge about the contents and organization of a standardized pediatric code cart, an important tool in safe, effective pediatric resuscitations. This study used focus groups and interviews with 22 clinicians to identify work system barriers and...

The development of affordable, efficient, effective and accessible surveillance testing has been a focus since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (i.e., COVID-19) in December 2019. Systems ergonomics can play an important role in pandemic response efforts beyond formal health care settings, including the translation of those tests to support c...

Chronically ill patients may be at risk of re-hospitalization or even death if their care transitions are poorly coordinated. Transitions of care create challenges for care coordination, such as insufficient or inefficient information exchange, i.e., communication, between different care settings. This paper focuses on communication that occurs dur...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world in 2020 by spreading at unprecedented rates and causing tens of thousands of fatalities within a few months. The number of deaths dramatically increased in regions where the number of patients in need of hospital care exceeded the availability of care. Many COVID-19 patients experience Acute Respiratory Dis...

There is an increasing need and interest for Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) professionals to apply our discipline to a larger context. HFE researchers are starting to conduct research outside of traditional settings, focusing their efforts on complex societal challenges; however, this type of work is still in its infancy and there is a need to...

The Diversity Committee of HFES has led sessions at the Annual Meeting for the past three years focused on improving diversity, equity and inclusion in the society as well as providing support to human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) researchers and practitioners who aim to apply HF/E knowledge and principles to improve diversity, equity and inclusio...

Pediatric codes are rare events that require fast intervention from medical professionals to resuscitate a child. A pediatric code cart contains all medications and equipment immediately needed to complete a pediatric resuscitation, but not all health care professionals (HCPs) know what is located on the cart and where. A mobile, augmented reality...

Care transitions are key to patient safety and remain a safety issue despite previous research. This study examines how the design of care transitions impacts different health care professions. Twenty-nine physicians and nurses were interviewed about operating room to intensive care unit care transitions. We compared relationships between work syst...

Virtual environments and immersive technologies are growing in popularity for human factors purposes. Whether it is training in a low-risk environment or using simulated environments for testing future automated vehicles, virtual environments show promise for the future of our field. The purpose of this session is to have current human factors prac...

Hospital-based care of pediatric trauma patients includes transitions between units that are critical for quality of care and patient safety. Using a macroergonomics approach, we identify work system barriers and facilitators in care transitions. We interviewed eighteen healthcare professionals involved in transitions from emergency department (ED)...

Patient safety remains a significant concern even in light of some improvements, such as reduction of healthcare-associated complications for hospitalized patients. We argue that renewed attention for systems approaches is necessary in order to more effectively tackle complex patient safety problems. We propose the concept of patient journey as a n...

The HFES Diversity Committee is entering its third year following many years existing as a task force. We have built a series of annual meeting content over the past years, with panels introducing the task force and then the committee; last year, we shifted focus to highlight examples of HFE research advancing diversity, inclusion and social justic...

Inpatient care of pediatric trauma patients includes care transitions, including from emergency department (ED) to operating room (OR), OR to pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and ED to PICU, which are important to patient safety and quality of care. Previous research identified work system barriers and facilitators in these transitions; the mos...

Care transitions are important to patient safety, but we lack consensus on what outcomes of transitions to evaluate. We interviewed 28 physicians and nurses who participate in transitions of adult and pediatric trauma patients from the operating room to the intensive care unit. The handoff (i.e., communication about patient information) in the pedi...

Trauma is the leading cause of disability and death in children and young adults in the US. While much is known about the medical aspects of inpatient pediatric trauma care, not much is known about the processes and roles involved in in-hospital care. Using human factors engineering methods, we combine interview, archival document, and trauma regis...

Pediatric trauma is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in children in the USA. Every year, nearly 10 million children are evaluated in emergency departments (EDs) for traumatic injuries, resulting in 250,000 hospital admissions and 10,000 deaths. Pediatric trauma care in hospitals is distributed across time and space, and particul...

Objective To describe physician perceptions of the potential goals, characteristics, and content of the electronic problem list (PL) in pediatric trauma. Methods We conducted 12 semistructured interviews with physicians involved in the pediatric trauma care process, including residents, fellows, and attendings from four services: emergency medicine...

About 9.2 million children visit the emergency department (ED) in the US annually because of trauma and 20% experience a missed injury. Upon arriving to the hospital, physicians evaluate the child and make the ED disposition decision of whether to admit, operate or discharge. The objective of this study is to report the challenges mentioned by heal...

Pediatric trauma is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in children in the USA. Several clinical teams converge to support trauma care in the Emergency Department (ED); the most severe trauma cases often need surgery in the operating room (OR) and/or are admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). These care transitions c...

Despite progress on patient safety since the publication of the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report, To Err Is Human, significant problems remain. Human factors and systems engineering (HF/SE) has been increasingly recognized and advocated for its value in understanding, improving, and redesigning processes for safer care, especially for complex in...

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Diversity Committee is entering its second year and continuing to explore ways to increase the diversity of the society. Following last year’s panel on “Challenges and Opportunities for Involvement,” we, and others, recognized that human factors and ergonomics (HFE) professionals are equipped and able to adv...

Delivering safe healthcare often involves multi-disciplinary teams working across multiple locations. Care transitions are required to provide continuity of care and are often fail due to this type of complexity. Care transitions occur in numerous settings, for example: during shift changes, transfer between wards, or during discharge to the patien...

Health care is fundamentally about people, and therefore, engineering approaches for studying healthcare systems must consider the perspective, concepts and methods offered by the human factors and ergonomics (HFE) discipline. HFE analysis is often qualitative to provide in-depth description of work systems and processes. To deepen our understandin...

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Diversity Committee met initially in January 2017, and on a regular basis thereafter to assess and improve diversity and inclusion in the society, profession, and discipline. Charged by president Bill Marras in 2016, the Committee replaced the Diversity Task Force established in 1994, and formally became a p...

Process mapping, often used as part of the human factors and systems engineering approach to improve care delivery and outcomes, should be expanded to represent the complex, interconnected sociotechnical aspects of health care. Here, we propose a new sociotechnical process modeling method to describe and evaluate processes, using the SEIPS model as...

Health information technology, i.e. secure messaging, can support high-quality, efficient care. Secure messaging – encrypted communication between patient and clinician or staff, similar to email – can facilitate patient-reported information and communication, but its fit with clinical workflow is not understood. Fifteen primary care clinicians and...

This poster described our ongoing efforts to apply GDTA to understand the cognitive work of primary care teams.

A systems engineering approach to healthcare processes is essential to improving healthcare delivery and outcomes. Process modeling is often used as a part of the systems engineering approach. Process modeling methodologies have been developed and used in other industries, but health care has not used these methods systematically. Additionally, cur...

This systematic literature review provides information on the use of mixed methods research in human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research in health care. Using the PRISMA methodology, we searched four databases (PubMed, PsycInfo, Web of Science, and Engineering Village) for studies that met the following inclusion criteria: (1) field study in heal...

The APA Handbook of Human Systems Integration is a practical tool for both students and professionals who need specific knowledge about human considerations in systems design. It is intended to sensitize readers to basic design issues, enhance their understanding of the influence of these issues, and guide them in appropriately combining human perf...

We conducted a systematic literature review on the use of mixed methods in healthcare human factors and ergonomics research. A total of 53 papers published in 39 journals before February 2013 were identified. These studies tackle a range of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) issues, in particular related to various types of information technology....

The healthcare system is plagued by quality problems. Systemic issues are said to be the root cause, and therefore a systematic approach is needed to transform healthcare to the ideal state. Understanding workflows has been identified as the initial step in this transformation. Industrial engineering provides tools that can be used to understand wo...

A regional, five hundred bed hospital is developing metrics to measure cycle times, patient volume, and delays due to the transition in healthcare to value-based purchasing. This presentation details the use of time study data to build the simulation model used to set a productivity standard in the Pre-Admission Testing department. Expansion of the...

This presentation applies the analytical hierarchy process to improving patient throughput time in a Children’s Hospital emergency Room. It is important for hospitals to use a decision making process when deciding the order of improving con icts and events. These results will help hospital administrators make better decisions on implementation stra...