Provider Centered Coordination, Resource Foraging, and Event Management in Healthcare Tasks

Garrett, Sandra Kay Powers. Ph.D., Purdue University, May 2007. Provider Centered Coordination, Resource Foraging, and Event Management in Healthcare Tasks. Major Professor: Barrett S. Caldwell The increasing complexity of healthcare and recent awareness of deaths and injuries associated with system errors has made patient safety an issue of national concern. Improving the quality and efficiency of the U.S. healthcare delivery system is a major theme in healthcare engineering, including the research presented in this dissertation. This research was focused on the task and resource needs of healthcare providers in clinic-based healthcare delivery. The original purpose of this study was to investigate how and when healthcare providers seek the information and resources necessary to deliver effective patient care, but it quickly branched out to incorporate more global goals of how to describe and improve the medical provider team’s ability to provide better and more efficient care to patients. The evolved dissertation defined and interpreted the concept of foraging theory in the context of healthcare providers’ strategies; expanded the definition of foraging to include dimensions essential in dynamic, event-driven, timecritical settings; and refined the definition of an event and associated deadline dynamics in team-based dynamic tasks.