Artificial Intelligence and Human Factors in Healthcare Quality & Safety

As AI rapidly transforms healthcare, offering new opportunities to improve patient safety, streamline processes, and enhance overall value, understanding how people interact with this technology has never been more critical. Decades of research have shown that technological advancements alone are not enough to drive meaningful and lasting improvements in healthcare quality and safety. Process failures persist despite traditional improvement methods such as workflow analysis and root cause investigations, which often focus on structured solutions without addressing deeper issues such as cognitive load, communication challenges, and system usability. While HFE, a field focused on understanding how people interact with systems and technology to improve performance and reduce errors, has been proven to create more sustainable improvements, it remains underutilized in healthcare. With the introduction of sophisticated AI tools, integrating HFE into AI implementation processes is essential to ensure that AI enhances, rather than complicates, clinical decision making.

To address this gap, researchers will convene a national conference centered around the dissemination of knowledge and implementation of best practices surrounding HFE in healthcare improvement. A key focus will be on the critical interaction between healthcare professionals and AI tools to ensure AI effectively supports clinical workflows.

The research specifically aims to:

• Share knowledge and best practices about HFE in healthcare, especially when using new and advanced AI tools.
• Show practical HFE methods that non-experts can use in everyday care, offer clear guidance for beginners, and collect this information in easy-to-access online resources that are regularly updated.
• Gather multidisciplinary experts in a forum to share collaborative approaches for applying HFE to real-world problems in healthcare delivery and provide networking opportunities.
• Develop a needs assessment and agenda for future HFE research for the next 5-7 years, emphasizing the integration of AI solutions to support and improve human performance.

The researchers will host a two-day national conference bringing together a multidisciplinary team of experts, clinicians, and industry leaders to share best practices, tools, and evidence-based strategies for optimizing human-AI interactions in healthcare, with a special focus on supporting clinical decision making, patient safety, and improving healthcare quality. They will also launch a website for pre-conference outreach to the public, acting as an ongoing repository for materials for meeting participants and a platform for collaboration and research to develop real-world solutions. Prior to the main conference, a smaller two-day research summit will gather top experts to assess current challenges and define a research agenda for the next 5–7 years, particularly on how AI can enhance human performance in healthcare. The findings from this summit will be presented at the conference and later published in a white paper to guide future research and improvements. This initiative aims to integrate HFE with AI.