Recap of 2021 HFES International Symposium on Healthcare in HF | #HCS2021Symposium | Bonus Episode

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hey everybody welcome back to a bonus episode of human factors cast uh we are recording this live on april 21st 2021 uh my name is nick rome and i'm joined today by elise hallett is over there hello elise how are you oh fantastic how are you doing nick i'm great we're back from a busy week at the healthcare symposium

yeah so we are here to break down kind of the healthcare symposium it's it's a conference on human factors in healthcare um i don't you want to talk a little bit about it for anyone who couldn't join us for our preview episode yeah let's do it so um this year so i talked a little bit in the preview episode about how this conference is broken up into different tracks so um this conference is actually an international conference so a lot of people from a lot of different parts of the world that are coming together to really talk about human factors in healthcare the type of people that come you know obviously include human factors professionals but it's different flavors of human factors professionals people working with medical devices people who are actually embedded in a hospital and then just beyond that we're also talking about you know sometimes doctors and nurses are coming i've met physical therapists who come to this conference just a lot of different people who are ultimately interested in in healthcare improving patient safety and this just takes kind of a human factors flare uh so to speak so they break up this conference it's it's been evolving i've been going for a few years and every time i come there's you know something new and something different just to you know show how they're really putting a lot of effort into tailoring this conference for the people who go i think they do a really good job but anyway so they do different tracks um there's i think five different ones they actually added a new one this year um to you know get at the like simulation and education aspect of supporting healthcare um and then you know they they tailor the talks based on those tracks so if you're only interested in say medical devices you're not you're in industry building medical devices then you know they make it pretty easy for you to attend talks that deal with that or if you're a human factor specialist who's embedded in a hospital which i find to be kind of an interesting role in and of itself you know there's a track for that so um you know they they gear the talks based on the people who are coming so you know it's pretty easy to to follow along and and find sessions that you're interested in yeah i it's so that new track that you mentioned the simulation i definitely that was kind of where i spend most of my time and i think that was a kind of a good um opportunity for me someone who's never been to a healthcare symposium before and is attending one uh virtually for the first time this time uh and full disclosure i did get a uh comp complimentary pass to the event um we can talk a little bit about how why or how that impacted my experience as well um but i i want to take a uh one step back and kind of talk briefly about the structure of this event um this event is online it's virtual uh obviously due right now to the age of covid and we're just kind of getting out of the pandemic kind of getting back into the swing of things we're not quite ready to do conferences yet in person and um you know i'll i'll go ahead and talk and then maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience elise but from my perspective this is very similar to the way that they did the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting last year they had this kind of virtual conference uh picture where you can click on different sections of like a virtual hotel a lobby where you can go to different rooms and see different things like there was a poster session there were you know different rooms for every different uh type of track and event going on and i think some of the things that really worked out well for me was the addition of some of the digital components that allow you to pick out your schedule and and prioritize them and be able to navigate to them with just one click right like hfes has had these apps in the past years where you know you kind of build your schedule and then it will tell you what room to go to but you still got to physically walk to that room and i think the removing that barrier of entry from putting it on your schedule to getting right into that content is um something that was really done well and like kudos hats off to the team over there i think it really worked well during the hfes annual meeting and it worked well during the healthcare symposium um and you know i think largely they should probably try to keep that if they ever try to do a hybrid approach but um so so from my perspective as someone who's seen this kind of knew what to expect nothing much has changed or at least i didn't perceive any changes from the virtual hfes event back in october of last year and so um for me i kind of went into it knowing what to expect but from someone with fresh eyes on a virtual event elise uh how how was the experience for you i mean it was really interesting so like nick said this is my first virtual conference i've gone to this particular conference in person before and so i was you know fairly familiar with the setup of it but logging in through a website was definitely a unique experience but um i did it was kind of cheesy but i really liked the whole lobby setup when you first come to the home page and how it's broken up and you know it really looks like like a hotel lobby where some of these conferences would be set up um and i gotta say one of my favorite touches that they did to really make this more personal is when you came into the lobby you know in in the morning when you're coming in you know for the first time there's a little video that pops up right away and you know on day one it was um joseph keebler and um tony andre uh who you know had put this together who were you know greeting me telling me what to expect that day um you know just just the little touches that you you know it would kind of get organically if you were there in person and you know they really i thought made a good effort and still trying to bring you know that that personal touch to you know the forum the one thing though i will say it was a little bit of a challenge was um when logging into the sessions sometimes if i got in a little bit early then um you know the event had started but sometimes i had to manually refresh my page and you know i i didn't know that at first so it'd be like a couple minutes into it i'm like man what what is happening and then there'd be you know a moderator sending on the chat like oh you have to refresh your page and you know so there are a little bit of workarounds there but i mean once you figured it out it you know wasn't too bad and it was pretty easy to navigate otherwise yeah you know one thing other structurally um and and i didn't encounter this at all and i'm curious if you did um at the uh annual meeting i actually encountered scenarios in which the researchers had pre-recorded their um their presentations and uh basically played it on a video so that way it's kind of exactly the information that they wanted to convey they're not on the time limit but they were still around to like answer questions i didn't see any of that this time around did you see any of that i think the only one that i saw that might have been like that i think they tried to play it off like it was live i'm not entirely sure but i think it was because of time zone issues um but otherwise every everything was live which i was actually very impressed with that i didn't see more technical issues um there might have been like two that i can think of at the top of my head where i i saw that so given the amount of people who are doing this live um you know the amount of people who are logging in to see it live like i thought that was very seamless um in terms of that like live interaction yeah i um i agree that the live aspect is always interesting that's why people tune in to us on twitch and youtube and periscope when we're recording these episodes because anything could go wrong at any minute um and you know that's why you go to nascar you go for the crashes you don't go for the race uh and so are you comparing the session with a nascar crash i'm comparing this podcast with a nascar crash let me put it that way so the uh i i would i would say if if i could offer one criticism is that that is what i would want to see more of is those pre-recorded sessions because then everything is taken into consideration ahead of time maybe you know you have a that zoom call where everyone is able to take questions from the audience at the you know at the end of their presentation or whatever but that way everything is just so cut and tight but this is also coming from somebody who produces content on a weekly basis and so and and i'm also being a little bit of a hypocrite here because we're recording this live so i don't know uh how dare you i think people want different things when it comes to understanding and disseminating research i want to almost just kind of take in the most perfect form of that and you know if somebody has recorded something multiple times they have picked the best edits of that and have that's the thing that they want to present right that's just me i don't know um but you know i was still very appreciative that everyone kind of uh was getting through some of these technical issues with the conference itself um especially for having the challenge of having everything virtually um anything else with the structure of the conference elise that you want to talk about yeah i mean there is like kind of piggybacking off of your point about the pre-recorded i think one of the rich elements of this conference is the discussion panels like you get these people who are out in the wild right and you know they they start talking about you know certain topics and then in the chat you see people starting to make comments and then it it kind of starts to turn into much more of a rich dynamic conversation that is incorporating not only the expertise of the people who are on the panel but then also the expertise of the people who are in you know the forum in the crowd so you know i think if they were to have done this differently moving forward where maybe there are elements that are pre-recorded um like you're saying i think there there should still be some balance though where like some of the sessions are live to really produce those rich conversations because i think that's why some people come to these conferences and i think it still brings that very organic element to the conversation that otherwise we would very much miss um with it being you know totally virtual yeah yeah and i might be getting a little cart before the horse here but you know we're we're no longer going to have exclusively or i hope that you know at this point we're no longer going to have exclusively virtual conferences um coming back out into the world after kovit's over and so that chat aspect is something that i really do appreciate because it does open up everybody to um not only see names that are asking the questions but it also allows you to have conversations while something is being presented and what would be cool and stick with me but everyone's on their phone during somebody's presentation in a live uh setting in a in a real hotel uh in person and you know you can chat out your question live um without interrupting and you can write it down so that way it's documented and you know you don't have to like stand in a line and awkwardly go you know what's this um oh shoot i forgot my question you know it's it's there right in the moment and you know people can as they're watching they can chat about it um i think that would be a super cool approach to like this hybrid thing right where everyone has kind of the chat in their pockets um and can just interact with it live yeah i love that idea it kind of makes me think back to undergrad when some of the more techy professors would have you know some of that integrated in their lecture right and so it even like gives some opportunity back to the lectures you know how many times have you been in a session and a lecturer like asks a question and nobody responds and it's just so awkward but like that's a really seamless way to do it in a room full of people where they might not always want to raise their hand but sending a chat or something through some some um electronic forum would you know definitely like help with that yeah i also noticed there was some interesting integrations going on right like they were using vimeo as the video provider and then they were using zoom for some of these um some of these networking events and they think they used youtube for the intro videos that they were pre-recorded so there was a lot of different technologies going on here um in this virtual conference and i think it all came together really well they all had their intended purpose um you know i would say that some of those technologies like using zoom right and this is again kind of the a little bit of a criticism here some of the technologies like zoom um i think there there is one instance and i'll talk about this a little later where i wanted i really wanted to get into a zoom call um but had a another um real world thing to attend to and i couldn't make it and so i tried to go and view it after the fact and i couldn't find the recording anywhere and i don't know if that's an artifact of you know maybe it just wasn't recorded or um something like that or maybe zoom doesn't allow it to interface with that and i have to go look somewhere else but that was a little clunky for me and i didn't actually get to see that thing that i really wanted to see again we'll talk about it in just a moment but um yeah but you bring up a good point like one of the things that i absolutely loved about this forum i cannot stress how much i loved it was being able to replay sessions because with me conferences are such a flood of information that after like half a day or by the time i get to thursday i'm just like so mentally tired from like hearing all this rich information and there are talks and i'm like oh i know this would be so interesting but uh i just don't have the mental capacity and so being able to replay them and and listen back to it you know not have to worry about like capturing notes right away i could just kind of absorb it i really liked that option a lot yeah it's really surprising to me that you're usually tapped out by like wednesday or thursday because i'm tapped out before the monday night usually the gala even starts so anyway um yeah i agree i think the playback is really useful and i think especially useful um i think anyone who attends or is a member can go back and watch it at any time um or for a certain set period of time it would be cool if all this was archived right because then i can be like i remember this presentation from hfes 2018 where they talked about the heuristics of vr and ar and they did and i would love to go back and rewatch that um something i think about quite often uh so the uh we all do yeah so um let's let's talk about uh some of our coverage so um we obviously did the preview um and this was kind of what we were hoping to attend this is this is kind of our agenda um if you tuned into that episode it was elise and i breaking down sort of what we were hoping to uh see and get to during the course of it um we didn't quite get to everything for reasons that we'll talk about in just a moment but we also um have some fun interesting interviews coming your way so elise you had a couple interviews um one of them is out now can you talk a little bit about your interview with rebecca butler yes um so this was actually an opportunistic setup because i attended one of the panels that rebecca was a part of so rebecca butler uh is with medstar health and she works as a human factory specialist that's really embedded in the quality and safety team working with other types of specialties supporting this network of hospitals and you know i know covid was the big topic this past year and so there you know but when you go to a healthcare conference you know and and healthcare was you know related to a global pandemic it's kind of the you know big thing but i think also too i mean just taking it from a human factors perspective there's so many opportunities for you know human factors to really shine you know because of it's it's this systemic thing that's impacting so many different types of people and and how you do that and how you address that i think raises a lot of really interesting questions so rebecca and her team their panel had focused specifically on the communication strategy uh between the hospital and its staff so you know in the beginning if you can uh you know dust off the cobwebs back to last march when everyone was like oh there's there's new information there's new information it's constantly updating you know well that was happening with the hospital staff you know and so how do you disseminate information about proper ppe guidance and um how you know to test people when that information is changing rapidly and and we're not even talking about um you know just considerations like this is stuff that can really impact patient safety and so you know it was an interesting problem that they had set out to figure out of how do you let's like strategize you know let's do the smart to talk about um you know how we're going to communicate this information and make sure that they know they're getting the latest and greatest and it's in a format that's usable and you know easy to understand yeah that was a great one to listen to um really excited for folks to hear that one i'm also really excited for folks to hear the other interview that you happen to do this one is not live yet as the as of the time of this recording but you actually uh interviewed murtied alfred mm-hmm yep that's correct so um dr martine alfred is with the medical university of south carolina and you know she and actually i met her a couple conferences ago um through a mutual um contact of ours and you know so every time these conferences pop up you know we it's an opportunity to to keep in touch that way so you know another benefit for folks listening of you know why these conferences are good um but anyway so she had some interesting research that she was a part of um you know both related to covid and then also beyond that um and you know i think she she had such a fantastic perspective of the benefit that human factors can apply specifically with respect to you know challenging topics such as equity such as accessibility really considering the diversity of you know our end users even though it may pose some extra challenges and and how we go about doing that so for example it's super easy to set up a web portal to you know get people to sign up for vaccine appointments this is just a very generic example to like hone in the point but when thinking about the diverse population that an area has not everyone might have access to you know getting to that website and so how do you support that okay let's let's figure out a a call in instead and you know that kind of support so um i thought that it was you know a very good perspective because you know human factors it's it's so much more beyond just um you know the products that we put forth or how we communicate with stakeholders it's really that lens and that perspective that we can bring to some of these discussions especially the ones that you know impact larger systemic um you know problems that we're trying to to sort out so you know in this case that the hospital is trying to sort out so i thought that that was very interesting and then she also touched on some of the research that she does you know when not focused on kovid believe it or not ladies and gentlemen um there is work outside of that i know i'm healthier that's weird i know i know no but um yeah she's she's done some interesting work and she's continuing to do interesting work so i think that's going to be a fun one for people to listen to yeah so actually that one uh will hopefully be hitting your ear holes soon um then there's also another one that i actually just wrapped up literally um an hour ago so this one was tell us about it yeah this one was with the um student design competition winners uh and um it was a great conversation um wait nick yes there's a student design competition what is that oh yeah that's where everybody gets together and they try to solve a problem in health care and um then there's a winner that's what happens i don't want to give away too much of the interview here but what i'm gonna say um it was very interesting and they um basically they uh they talked about um this let me so it was sophia divya and anna and they were the they were called team mothership of of um this design competition and basically what their app was trying to do was to solve the problem that working mothers had in the time of covet where um they are exposed to task overload there's a bunch of different tasks as them as the default caregiver have to do right like you know take care of the child and work um and so they were trying to solve this problem by not only interfacing with task management but also with community building uh with other mothers and lastly you know kind of exposing them to research um and so you can hear more about their chat later on this week hopefully we'll get that out to you if not this week next week we're just waiting on a couple things but all those will be available all those interviews will be available to you as part of our health care symposium coverage it was it was a i felt like all these interviews are really great yeah and they were they were pretty opportunistic in general i think you and i got plugged in a little late in the game and we were still able to come out with some pretty interesting talks yeah and just a quick plug um this student design competition is something that this conference does every year so if you are a student and you are interested in you know finding ways to get involved in the professional community this is one really awesome opportunity they've been doing it for i mean ever since i was in grad school not to date myself or anything but um you know so they do it every year and it's it's always seems like a lot of fun yeah it sounded like a ton of fun um so with that there's um let's talk about what we actually were able to get to um you know full disclosure like i said at the top i got a comp pass and this is because uh you know planning for a conference is is um when you go to a conference physically it's often your main focus is to go to the conference and network with people catch up with old friends go to things that you're interested in when it's virtual um at least for me and especially since i got this so late breaking i think we talked about it literally the friday before it happened um and uh it was um it's one of those things where i really had to i struggled with uh attending sessions balancing real world work um and family obligations as well as a podcast to push out right so like um all these things together prohibited me from attending as many as i wanted to i still got to a couple of them but again part of the beauty of this symposium is that everything is recorded and then i can go back later and watch it and that's really nice um so you know i'll talk about a couple things but elise what so let's let's just talk about it from this perspective what were some of the favorite things that you were able to go to um so i i'm sure other people probably experienced this too i experienced a similar challenge that that you did and i would imagine that even if people had a heads up you know and were able to plan around you know work and such they would probably still run into this issue of trying to balance things um but all that being said um i was able to catch the opening talk with um john nance who you know really talked about this concept of um you know what is good enough how are we defining good enough um so with that um i'll actually dive into that one just a little bit um and i have my notes over yeah i was there too so we can bounce off of each other on this one perfect so he actually he comes from an aviation background and i always get really interested when people come from one domain and then you know kind of apply metaphors across domains um so you know he had this one story that i really enjoyed um where he was the co-pilot on a plane and there was this lol which he defined as a little old lady not not laugh out loud but a little old lady which is actually i think a technical acronym he was saying that they they have this is the turnaround story this is the turnaround story and she was saying that you know so they he he gets this you know notification up in the cockpit pit there's this you know lol who wants to talk to you know one of the pilots and you know so him being the co-pilot he's like okay i'll go back there and you know so he makes his way and you know it's the very back of the plan plane and she's like oh there looks to be like there's some fluid coming off the plane and you know he had you know been formulating in his mind like all the reasons why they're they're like oh maybe it's precipitation and what and he looks out the window and sure enough there is like gallons of fuel that is escaping from one of the the wings and so he's like oh that that's interesting rushes up to the front like gets you like talks to the other pilot turns it around um and it's it ended up being a near miss and you know they were able to get everyone you know safely to the ground but it is just one of those stories about um how he was he was primed you know because just like a week or two before that he said that they had gotten a notification from the airline about you know oh you should you should really pay attention to what everyone around you is saying and that includes passengers on the plane so do not dismiss what people are saying because they might have a perspective that that you don't always see right away and sure and so he had read this i was like okay great and then this happens and you know they're able to you know save everyone because he had listened to that and didn't you know dismiss the passenger and so he was talking a lot about you know communication communication is so you know critical with all this and if we assume we are you know 100 error-free we are perfect um you know which is essentially the perspective that i think a lot of physicians and surgeons are are trained with you know they have to you know be performing at this high level because the patient is in their hands but that has its own kind of follow-on implications as a result of it so um yeah what did you think of the talk nick i thought it was a great talk um lots of fun entertaining clips from pop culture that really kind of hammered home his point of communication uh and back to the aviation story you know it wasn't just the communication between the lol and the co-pilot it was also the communication between the co-pilot and the pilot the pilot didn't want to listen to him you know he's like what's going on and he just said if you trust me just turn around right now i'll explain in a minute and you know it's like you know the trust between teammates needs to be there too i think that talk largely was important because you know like you said we're talking about um basically how we're not perfect and i think the the lesson of that story or that talk is that we can't necessarily fault ourselves um for being error-prone in in certain situations but we do need to change how we think about adopting some of these newer tools um and adopt how we approach some of these processes for the betterment of patients right i think there was there was a story that he was telling about um some doctor that didn't want to adopt a technology because it was the way it's always been done he was talking about how dangerous that way of thinking is when it comes to patient health because um you know someone looks up a procedure and understands that it's more effective than maybe something else and if they're not getting it from this doctor because just because the doctor doesn't want to learn it then they're not getting the optimal care that they deserve so i thought overall it was just an incredibly powerful um uh story and and talk and i'm really glad that i was able to attend that one for sure yeah that it was a really good one he had one quote in there it was something along the lines of any human system built on the expectation of perfect human performance has built itself to fail and i thought it was so good because you know he was trying to hone in on the fact that you know a lot of times in healthcare you know people you know people are trained to be 100 100 of the time and so you talk about these long shifts you talk about like all this complicated technology that's constantly being introduced into the hospital and and then you're like training people they have to be 100 all the time it's just um you know and then he made this other great point where you know it's important to believe that we can get to zero in terms of error rates and how he had overheard you know when this concept was first coming out in aviation and they were bringing in crew resource management and you know this concept of decreasing error rates was really starting to become a forefront he had overheard someone say like we can't possibly get to zero like that's impossible you know we're gonna make mistakes and he's like yeah that's true but if we if we don't believe that we can get to that we will never come close you know it's that bar that we're setting and so overall i thought this was a great like starting talk to the conference it was like the exact kind of inspiration that i think a lot of people who are working in healthcare probably needed to you know reinvigorate that that motivation of not motivation but you know inspiration of you know pushing the bounds and really getting past the curmudgeony personalities that sometimes might you know pop up there yeah for sure so i want to be respectful of our time here so i'm going to ask you rapid fire give me like the top three things that you attended uh that and and some fun takeaways ready go oh gosh okay so there was one it was an opening session with medical devices and it was talking about um this concept of does human factors actually save lives and it was it was interesting because it's hard to measure a problem if we're preventing things so um you know it was an interesting way of thinking about like roi and how human factors is really making an impact and um you know how to try to measure that and so that was an interesting one um topics about covid were were interesting for me especially when talking to people who are embedded in the hospital one of my favorites in that actually um is i guess when kovid first started hfes i think it was hfes put out a talk about like covid specifically and how you can get involved as a human factors person and that actually inspired quite a few um you know professionals embedded in these hospitals to go reach out to their bosses and say hey like this is what i can do how can we get involved and that actually started projects and it was because of you know this outreach event that um you know hfes had put forth and so they were like we want to see more stuff like that because you know that was really motivating so i thought that was a really cool like full circle moment where it actually inspired people to reach out and then from that get interacted you know get involved in in projects and uh back to you nick rapid fire what are some of your favorites uh so some of my favorites here um education and simulation keynote they also talked about aviation and it you know they were talking about kind of what can we apply from other domains to healthcare um they also talked about you know usability of medical devices and equipment and and um sort of implementing some of these guidelines and protocols for um for equipment as well uh so that was that education simulation keynote was pretty interesting i would say uh there's a there's another talk about cognitive assessment games saving us from cognitive decline so you know we're kind of preserving our the problem space is that we're preserving our bodies for longer but we're not necessarily preserving our minds for longer um with you know dementia uh and other um aging effects uh so so they were looking at like mobile applications uh allowing measurements to be taken taken worldwide so it has this big scale a large scope and allows you to standardize across multiple countries so you can kind of get some of that information last one that i'll kind of briefly mention here is that um chat bots and gamification there was a really interesting um chat uh talk about chat bots and gamification and kind of what is a chat bot um and how healthcare um is impacted by this right because if you talk to a chat bot there's all these different considerations that you have to make like there's somebody who's behind the scenes designing a conversation almost like a theater director um they have to map out these conversations like what are some potential things they might say here um and then you know it's it's also there's the ethics behind it like what happens if a person thinks they're actually talking to a human um instead of a chat bot so that was also a very interesting chat uh without getting too into him and too spoilery i'd highly recommend anyone who was able to attend go listen to those um if not find a way to uh you know get in touch with those researchers because they were some pretty interesting things um with that elise any other closing thoughts on the healthcare symposium for 2021. um not anything big i'm just really thankful that i was able to attend and have it be in a virtual environment it was a little tricky juggling it with you know work at the same time but um honestly i'm most excited to like recap on the sessions that i missed and like continue watching some of them and and learning um and for folks who are interested they are actually doing it in person next year i think in new orleans so that's the plan and it sounds like it should be a lot of fun we'll see you in new orleans right all right uh for me i think the the the one key takeaway i have with this is is if you're going to a conference give it your full undivided attention like get go out to a hotel locally or something and just attend the things that you want to attend it's it's kind of weird um with the virtual format i am thankful for it um i just think that if you try to do it all you won't be able to do much of any of it um you know so take that take what you will from that but that's going to be it for today everyone let us know what you guys think of the uh coverage of the healthcare symposium um if you want to you can hang out with us in our slack or discord or get to us at any of our social channels you can visit our official website and sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest human factors news if you like what you hear you want to support the show there's a couple ways you can do that one leave us a five star review on your podcatcher of choice uh if they don't have one you can leave it on our website two tell your friends about us that's how we help the show grow and three if you're able to consider supporting us on patreon um that really helps us too uh and as always links to uh all the stuff that we talked about the healthcare symposium all of our interviews will be in the links in the description below uh i want to thank elise hallett for being on the show today and breaking down this healthcare symposium with me where can our listeners go and find you if they want to talk about the healthcare symposium yeah you can find me on linkedin it's probably the best way thank you so much for letting me be on the show nick this has been so much fun well thank you for joining me elise i really appreciate it and i always like when we when we get to chat about human factors together uh as for me i've been your host nick rome you can find me streaming on twitch tuesdays at 11 00 a.m for office hours and across social media at nick underscore rome thanks again for tuning in to human factors cast until next time it depends it depends