8.4.1 Infusing Healthcare with Resilience

Resilience engineering strives to build the adaptive capacity of systems that is essential to continue operations in the face of substantial challenges. The healthcare enterprise provides a compelling opportunity to consider resilience as a desirable trait of systems. Clinicians, from physicians to nurses and technicians, are a source of resilience and develop and rely on artifacts from status boards to information systems and equipment to perform cognitive work. While information technology (IT) systems have been promoted as a means to improve patient safety, current information systems and equipment systems are brittle and erode resilience instead of contributing to it. Based on a five-year study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, we present a concept for an infusion device interface that would contribute to resilience. © 2010 The Authors.