The Science of Safety: Transforming Healthcare Through Human Factors
ECRI presented in Modern Healthcare’s Looking Ahead to 2025 Virtual Briefing on “The Science of Safety: Transforming Healthcare Through Human Factors.” The event brought together healthcare leaders for discussions on how emerging trends, needs and technologies will shape 2025. ECRI and Cooper University Healthcare explored the essential role that human factors engineering plays in tackling healthcare challenges.
In 2025, the healthcare industry will continue to experience rapid technological advancements in increasingly complex, ever-evolving care settings. Designing work systems to support humans has never been more critical to ensuring safety, efficiency and optimal patient outcomes.
In this panel, experts will reveal how human factors engineering can transform healthcare environments, drawing from practical examples and real-world case studies where this advanced safety science has driven measurable improvements. Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or new to human factors engineering, this session features actionable insights, inspiring success stories and forward-looking strategies to bring positive change in 2025 – from reducing safety events in high-stakes settings to streamlining workflows for frontline staff.
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Speakers
Michael Kirchhoff, MD
Chief Innovation Officer and Patient Safety Officer, Cooper University Health Care
Michael Kirchhoff, MD has been on key teams that have brought new business units to Cooper including Emergency Medicine Contracted Services, Urgent Care, Emergency Medical Services, and the Helicopter Transport Program. He has developed applications for Graduate Medical Education procedure tracking, hospital coding/charging and revenue cycle audit, external provider post-acute communication, and ED over-crowding surveillance. He currently helps to drive organizational intellectual property management and development, outside business development partnerships, and inter-institutional resource sharing. He has served as the Medical Director for the Emergency Department, Urgent Care, Simulation Lab, and EM Ultrasound. Dr. Kirchhoff is the Patient Safety Officer for the health system as well as board eligible for Medical Informatics and is active in business intelligence, reporting, and planning.
Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD
President and CEO, ECRI
Dr. Marcus Schabacker became president and chief executive officer of ECRI in January 2018. Dr. Schabacker is a board-certified anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with more than 35 years of healthcare experience in complex global environments, and more than 20 years of senior leadership responsibilities serving the medical device and pharmaceutical industries across the healthcare value chain. Keep reading.
Patrice D. Tremoulet, PhD
Director of Human Factors Engineering, ECRI
Dr. Tremoulet has more than two decades of experience designing intuitive human machine interfaces for complex, information-intensive systems. She has spearheaded a broad range of advanced human-computer interaction research during her career and co-established the Interaction Design and Engineering for Advanced Systems (IDEAS) process for producing computer systems that optimize human performance.
Dr. Tremoulet has played important leadership roles in several DoD initiatives, including serving as Principal Investigator on the DARPA Augmented Cognition program — an effort that entailed using physiological data to assess individual cognitive state in real-time. Her research interests include developing intelligent information systems that use human data (e.g. medical images, vital signs, reaction times, verbal, numerical or abstract reasoning assessments, neurological measures, etc.) to support healthcare and/or to improve job performance by enabling more effective human-machine interaction.
Learn more about the Modern Healthcare Virtual Briefing, held December 12, 2024.