MacroErgonomics Safety and Health Laboratory

About the MacroErgonomic Safety and Health Laboratory

Pictured from left to right: Richard Holden, A. Joy Rivera, Calvin Or, Professor Ben-Tzion Karsh, Sam Alper, and Mike Lausten

The MESH Lab is focused on using industrial and human factors engineering theories, design principles and methodologies to improve patient safety and health care employee safety. As the Figure below helps to demonstrate, the studies we undertake seek to understand how the fit or misfit of healthcare system components contributes to patient and clinician outcomes such as adverse drug events, medication safety protocol violations, medical errors, health information technology acceptance and use, clinician job satisfaction and burnout, and clinician mental workload. The left side of the figure has a pyramid representing the multilevel nature of the healthcare system. The results of the interactions among the system components in the multilevel system are what we seek to better understand.  To learn more about how we use the pyramid to guide our research, see some of our recent publications:

• Holden, R. J. and Karsh, B. (2007). A review of medical error reporting system design considerations and a proposed cross-level system research framework. Human Factors , 49(2) , 257-276.
• Scanlon, M.C. , Karsh, B., Densmore, E., (2006). Human Factors and Pediatric Patient Safety. Pediatric Clinics of North America , 53 , 1105-1119.
• Karsh, B. , Holden, R. J., Alper, S. J., and Or, K. L. (2006). A human factors engineering paradigm for patient safety- designing to support the performance of the health care professional. Quality and Safety in Healthcare, 15(Suppl I) , i59-i65.
• Holden, R. J. and Karsh, B . (2007). A theoretical model of health information technology behavior. Behaviour and Information Technology, In Press.

To achieve our goals, we collect data from patients and clinicians in pediatric and adult hospitals and primary care clinics. We are fortunate to have received nearly $2 million in funding from organizations such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the United Kingdom Department of Health, the Medical College of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Academy of Family Physicians, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School.

The MESH lab and its director, Dr. Ben-Tzion Karsh, are actively involved in the UW-Madison Systems Engineering Initiative in Patient Safety

Mission

Create, acquire, assimilate, apply, and transfer knowledge, using human factors engineering, for the design, analysis, improvement and implementation of complex health care systems for the purpose of improving health care patient and employee safety and health.

Vision

To improve the health and well-being of all health care employees and their patients through research that leads to the design of safe health care systems.

Location

Affiliations

• Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Systems Engineering Initiative in Patient Safety
• Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement