Abstract
What role will human factors professionals play in healthcare 2020? Health systems throughout the world face a number of common pressures, related to demography, epidemiology, science and technology developments, and medical demand. In particular, while developments in technology do not just provide health care with new possibilities for human factors engineering, medical interventions and therapies. They also produce changes the in our understanding of sickness and health, the possibilities and needs for managing the systems, for innovation, for standardization, and the political and economic relationships. The health care providers not only have to cope with these technological developments but assure their successful implementation and acceptance. The uncertainties and expectations linked to these innovations face major issues within the research and health care system, such as policies for managing scarcity of resources and changes in the relative frequency of diseases because of factors like ageing, and mobile global population and the like. A panel of both healthcare and human factors experts will discuss the role that human factors will play in healthcare in 2020.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.