Studying Rigorously Defined Health Care Processes

Describe, capture, and improve a complex health care process – verifying a patient’s identity. Deploy a novel set of methods – formal process modeling using a language called Little-JIL,

simulations with embedded errors, observations, and eye tracking technology. Compare actual and ideal processes.

Formally Model and Analyze Processes Using Little-JIL

Capture How Real Individuals Complete Complex Processes

Compare Individuals’ Behaviors to the Little-JIL Process Model

• Define a process – such as verifying a patient’s identity – at any level of detail

• Specify how to handle exceptional, non-normative conditions

• Use the model as a basis for analyses (including automated analyses)

• Detect and correct modes of failure• Assist decision making aimed at

improving the process

• Create clinical scenarios that realistically reflect providers’ work (e.g. verify patient ID before administering a medication)

• Embed an error in one scenario for each provider (e.g., ID error for one of the patients each provider sees)

• Observe providers, visually and using eye tracking equipment, as they complete the scenarios

• Granularity: map physical events (e.g. look at name on ID band) to Little-JIL cognitive processes (e.g. verification)

• Operation Under Exceptional Events: assess process differences for a single individual across scenarios with and without ID errors

• Individual and Group Differences: compare process differences across individuals and groups (e.g. role-type, whether an individual caught the verify patient ID error)