Utilizing Human Factors to Improve Surgeons’ Data Access

Improving health care quality has been a focus for human factors practitioners in the past decades. Built on the new computerized information provided by Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS), we conducted interviews with 21 surgeons to explore how this surgical information can help improve surgeons’ efficiency and proficiency. Almost all the participants we interviewed considered their surgical data access to be limited. In addition, they indicated that insights from surgical data could help improve their efficiency and proficiency. We present our findings in two main categories: the surgeons’ current data access and the tools surgeons use to access surgical data. We also documented what surgical data surgeons need, why they need the data and how the data could help improve surgeons’ efficiency and proficiency. Our findings and proposed designs were incorporated in My Intuitive App designs to implement values identified by our Human Factors analysis.