JMIR Human Factors

(Re-)designing health care and making health care interventions and technologies usable, safe, and effective.

Editor-in-Chief:

Andre Kushniruk, BA, MSc, PhD, FACMI, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada


Impact Factor 2.6 CiteScore 3.4

JMIR Human Factors (JHF, ISSN 2292-9495, Journal Impact Factor™ 2.6 (Journal Citation Reports™ from Clarivate, 2023)) is a multidisciplinary journal with contributions from design experts, medical researchers, engineers, and social scientists.

JMIR Human Factors focuses on understanding how the behaviour and thinking of humans can influence and shape the design of health care interventions and technologies, and how the design can be evaluated and improved to make health care interventions and technologies usable, safe, and effective. This includes usability studies and heuristic evaluations, studies concerning ergonomics and error prevention, design studies for medical devices and healthcare systems/workflows, enhancing teamwork through Human Factors based teamwork training, measuring non-technical skills in staff like leadership, communication, situational awareness and teamwork, and healthcare policies and procedures to reduce errors and increase safety.

JMIR Human Factors focuses aspires to lead health care towards a culture of "usability by design", as well as to a culture of testing, error-prevention and safety, by promoting and publishing reports rigorously evaluating the usability and human factors aspects in health care, as well as encouraging the development and debate on new methods in this emerging field. Possible contributions include usability studies and heuristic evaluations, studies concerning ergonomics and error prevention, design studies for medical devices and healthcare systems/workflows, enhancing teamwork through human factors-based teamwork training, measuring non-technical skills in staff like leadership, communication, situational awareness and teamwork, and healthcare policies and procedures to reduce errors and increase safety. Reviews, viewpoint papers and tutorials are as welcome as original research.

All articles are professionally copyedited and typeset.

JMIR Human Factors is indexed in National Library of Medicine (NLM)/MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, DOAJ, Scopus, Sherpa Romeo, PsychINFO, and the Web of Science (WoS)/ESCI.

Recent Articles

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Participatory Design and Participatory Research

The rapid advancement of telehealth has led to the emergence of avatar-based psychotherapy (ABP), which combines the benefits of anonymity with nonverbal communication. With the adoption of remote mental health services, understanding the efficacy and user experience of ABP has become increasingly important.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research for Human Factors Research

Peer support groups or web-based chats for young people offer anonymous peer support in judgment-free spaces, where users may share their thoughts and feelings with others who may have experienced similar situations. User engagement is crucial for effective web-based peer support; however, levels of engagement vary. While moderation of peer support groups can have a positive impact on the engagement of young people, effective moderation can be challenging to implement.

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Requirements Engineering

Increasing use of computational methods in health care provides opportunities to address previously unsolvable problems. Machine learning techniques applied to routinely collected data can enhance clinical tools and improve patient outcomes, but their effective deployment comes with significant challenges. While some tasks can be addressed by training machine learning models directly on the collected data, more complex problems require additional input in the form of data annotations. Data annotation is a complex and time-consuming problem that requires domain expertise and frequently, technical proficiency. With clinicians’ time being an extremely limited resource, existing tools fail to provide an effective workflow for deployment in health care.

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Methods in Human Factors Research

Background: Rhinolaryngoscope is one of the most widely utilized tool routinely employed by otolaryngologists and speech-language pathologists in current clinical practice. However, there is limited data to ascertain association from causation for reported adverse events to the use of rhinolaryngoscope.

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Tools and Questionnaires in Human Factors Evaluation

Health care institutions face high systemic risk due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of their operations. This often leads to stressful incidents impacting the well-being of health care professionals, which can compromise the effectiveness of health care systems. Enhancing resilience among health care professionals is essential for maintaining high-quality care and ensuring patient safety. The role of middle managers is essential to ensure the response capacity of individuals and teams.

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Tools and Questionnaires in Human Factors Evaluation

Patient-reported outcome (PRO) data refer to information systematically reported by patients, or on behalf of patients, without the influence of health care professionals. It is a focal point of the health care system’s ambition toward becoming more involving and personalized. It is recognized that PROs provide valuable data. However, despite this recognition, there are challenges related to both patients’ and clinicians’ accurate interpretations of the quantitative data. To overcome these challenges, this study explores text vignettes as a representation of PROs.

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Design and Usability of Clinical Software and EHRs

Through third party applications, patients in the United States have access to their electronic health record (EHR) data from multiple health care providers. However, these applications offer only a predefined organization of these records by type, time stamp, or provider, leaving out meaningful connections between them. This prevents patients from efficiently reviewing, exploring, and making sense of their EHR data based on current or ongoing health issues. The lack of personalized organization and important connections can limit patients’ ability to use their data and make informed health decisions.

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Design and Usability of Clinical Software and EHRs

A smart medication dispenser called “spencer” is a novel generator of longitudinal survey data. The patients dispensing medication act as a survey panel and respond to questions about quality of life and patient-reported outcomes.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research for Human Factors Research

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) has a high worldwide prevalence and there are few effective treatment options. Patient education can influence patient behavior that subsequently may lead to changes in attitudes and skills necessary for maintenance or improvement in management of symptom severity and quality of life. However, as post-diagnostic patient education can be resource demanding, assessment of a digital approaches and verification of their effectiveness is warranted.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research for Human Factors Research

Problem gambling and gambling disorder cause severe social, psychiatric, and financial consequences, and voluntary self-exclusion is a common harm reduction tool used by individuals with gambling problems.

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Participatory Design and Participatory Research

Digital health innovations provide an opportunity to improve access to care, information, and quality of care during the perinatal period, a critical period of health for mothers and infants. However, research to develop perinatal digital health solutions needs to be informed by actual patient and health system needs in order to optimize implementation, adoption, and sustainability.

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Tools and Questionnaires in Human Factors Evaluation

Evaluating digital health service delivery in primary health care requires a validated questionnaire to comprehensively assess users’ ability to implement tasks customized to the program’s needs.

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