Prof Harold Thimbleby …
Recent papers on healthcare, IT, and medical apps
I am developing a new web site for 2024! This old site is just to say something to keep people happy while I work on the new one. Meanwhile, please have a look at our new booklet on patient safety and digital health.
Recent controversies over pandemic modelling
- Improving science that uses code
As code is now an inextricable part of science it should be supported by competent Software Engineering, analogously to statistical claims being properly supported by competent statistics. If and when code avoids adequate scrutiny, science becomes unreliable and unverifiable because results — text, data, graphs, images, etc — depend on untrustworthy code.
Currently, scientists rarely assure the quality of the code they rely on, and rarely make it accessible for scrutiny. Even when available, scientists rarely provide adequate documentation to understand or use it reliably.
This paper proposes and justifies ways to improve science using code: (1) Professional Software Engineers can help, particularly in critical fields such as public health, climate change and energy. (2) Software Engineering Boards, analogous to Ethics or Institutional Review Boards, should be instigated and used. (3) The Reproducible Analytic Pipeline (RAP) methodology can be generalized to cover code and Software Engineering methodologies, in a generalization this paper introduces called RAP+. RAP+ (or comparable interventions) could be supported and or even required in journal, conference and funding body policies.
The paper’s Supplemental Material provides a summary of Software Engineering best practice relevant to scientific research, including further suggestions for RAP+ workflows.
About cybersecurity, including WannaCry
- Lessons From the 100 Nation Ransomware Attack — link to blog with Prof Ross Koppel, University of Pennsylvania
- Cybersecurity problems in a typical hospital (and probably in all of them)
- Safety versus Security in Healthcare IT
General overview
- Improve IT ... improve health
- Trust me I'm a computer
- Preventable error
- Making healthcare safer by understanding, designing and buying better IT
- The Healthtech Declaration
- Improving safety in medical devices and systems
- MediCHI: Safer Interaction in Medical Devices
- Designing IT to reduce drug dose error
Human error
Mostly about apps
- Safety hazards in clinical calculators and apps (poster)
- Safety hazards in clinical calculators and apps (abstract)
- What makes a good clinical app?
- Literature review for apps
- Managing Gravity Infusion Using a Mobile App
- Drug calculations shouldn't be dangerous
Mostly about numbers
- Reasons to Question Seven Segment Displays
- Interactive numerals
- Safer user interfaces: A case study in improving number entry
- Reducing number entry errors: solving a widespread, serious problem
- Unreliable numbers: Error and harm induced by bad design can be reduced by better design
Mostly about infusion pumps
- Analysis of infusion pump error logs and their significance for health care
- Safer "5-key" number entry user interfaces using Differential Formal Analysis
- Issues in number entry user interface styles: Recommendations for mitigation
Other topics
- Understanding User Requirements in Take-Home Diabetes Management Technologies
- Interactive Technologies for Health Special Interest Group
- Ignorance of Interaction Programming Is Killing People
On this infusion pump, the rate is simultaneously shown as 0.02 mL/h and in an error warning as minus 0.1 (it’s exsanguinating!). What does the log say, and who will be to blame for any harm?
> Next … Talking & speaking
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