Back to Search
Start Over
Opportunistic decision making and complexity in emergency care
- Source :
- Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 44:469-476
- Publication Year :
- 2011
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2011.
-
Abstract
- In critical care environments such as the emergency department (ED), many activities and decisions are not planned. In this study, we developed a new methodology for systematically studying what are these unplanned activities and decisions. This methodology expands the traditional naturalistic decision making (NDM) frameworks by explicitly identifying the role of environmental factors in decision making. We focused on decisions made by ED physicians as they transitioned between tasks. Through ethnographic data collection, we developed a taxonomy of decision types. The empirical data provide important insight to the complexity of the ED environment by highlighting adaptive behavior in this intricate milieu. Our results show that half of decisions in the ED we studied are not planned, rather decisions are opportunistic decision (34%) or influenced by interruptions or distractions (21%). What impacts these unplanned decisions have on the quality, safety, and efficiency in the ED environment are important research topics for future investigation.
- Subjects :
- Adaptive behavior
Emergency Medical Services
Knowledge management
Data collection
Quality Assurance, Health Care
Decision engineering
business.industry
media_common.quotation_subject
Naturalistic decision-making
Decision Making
Health Informatics
R-CAST
Computer Science Applications
Business decision mapping
Humans
Quality (business)
Emergency Service, Hospital
business
Psychology
media_common
Decision analysis
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15320464
- Volume :
- 44
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Biomedical Informatics
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....02e30a8bbb9995d3a58cb91a156da897