JMIR Human Factors

The healthcare sector's digital transformation has accelerated, yet adverse drug events (ADE) continue to rise, posing significant clinical and economic challenges. Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), particularly those related to medication, are crucial for improving patient care, identifying Drug-Related Problems (DRP) and reducing ADE. Hospital pharmacists play a key role in utilizing CDSS for patient management and safety. Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) methods are essential for designing effective, human-centered CDSS. HFE involves three phases: exploration, design, and evaluation, with exploration being critical yet often overlooked in literature. For medication-related CDSS, understanding hospital pharmacists' tasks and challenges is vital for creating user-centered solutions.

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies have the potential to enhance cancer patient management, communication, and overall quality of life. The MyPal project, employing a participatory design approach, aims to provide palliative care support for cancer patients through an electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) eHealth platform.

Guided mobile-based interventions may mitigate symptoms of anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, agoraphobia, or social anxiety disorder. With exposure therapy being efficacious in traditional treatments for these disorders, recent advancements have introduced 360° videos to deliver virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) within mobile-based interventions.

The World Health Organization anticipates a shortage of 14 million health workers by 2030, particularly affecting the Global South. Community health workers (CHWs) may mitigate the shortages of professional health care workers. Recent studies have explored the feasibility and effectiveness of shifting noncommunicable disease (NCD) services to CHWs. Challenges, such as high attrition rates and variable performance, persist due to inadequate organizational support and could hamper such efforts. Research on employee empowerment highlights how organizational structures affect employees’ perception of empowerment and retention.

The virtual nursing (VN) delivery model enables the provision of expert nursing care from a remote location, using technology such as audio/video communication, remote monitoring devices, and access to the electronic health record (EHR). Virtual nurses spend an extensive amount of time on computers to provide care, and little is known about how this workflow may affect and contribute to cognitive fatigue.

Cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension often remain undetected and untreated. This was particularly problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic when there were fewer in-person medical consultations.

Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs), such as rheumatoid arthritis and spondyloarthritis, pose challenges due to recurrent flares and gaps in patient monitoring. Traditional healthcare models often fail to capture disease progression effectively.

The growing demand for hospital-based care, driven by ageing populations and constrained resources, has accelerated the adoption of telehealth tools such as virtual consultations and remote monitoring in Hospital-at-Home programmes. Despite their increasing use in delivering acute care at home, studies exploring healthcare providers' experiences and perceptions of these tools within Hospital-at-Home settings remain limited.

Cardiac pain has been widely considered to be the primary indicator of coronary artery disease. The presentation of cardiac pain and associated symptoms vary in women, making it challenging to interpret as cardiac, possibly cardiac, or noncardiac. Women prefer to consult with family and friends instead of seeking immediate medical care.

Telemedicine represents an essential tool with the potential to reduce health costs, thus avoiding patient displacement and improving patient care outcomes, positioning it as a significant social technology.

Electronic health records (EHRs) offer a valuable resource for research and healthcare improvement. However, public acceptance, regarding the sharing of personal health data, is crucial for the success of such initiatives. In Germany, automatic data sharing via EHRs will be implemented unless people opt out. This study aims to assess the willingness of the German population to share health data via EHRs and to explore the role of trust in influencing these attitudes.

Commercial wearable and mobile wellness apps and devices have become increasingly affordable and ubiquitous. One of their aims is to assist the individual wearing them in adopting a healthier lifestyle through tracking and visualizing their data. Some of these devices and apps have a wheelchair mode that indicates that they are designed for different types of bodies (eg, wheelchair users with spinal cord injury [SCI]). However, research focuses mainly on designing and developing new condition-specific self-tracking technology, whereas the experiences of wheelchair users with SCI using self-tracking technology remain underexplored.