About us
Mission
To improve the safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of healthcare through human factors-based research, training, evaluation, and design.
Vision
A human-centered healthcare system designed by the people who use it.
About us
Mission
To improve the safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of healthcare through human factors-based research, training, evaluation, and design.
Vision
A human-centered healthcare system designed by the people who use it.
The Healthcare Human Factors Lab (HHFL) leverages a cross-disciplinary team to deepen our understanding of healthcare workers and the equipment, technology, and environments with which they interact. We see the complexity and demand of healthcare workers’ jobs and seek, first and foremost, to make those jobs safer and easier, enabling healthcare workers to focus on providing excellent patient care.
How We Began
Healthcare worker safety and infection prevention and control have always been an integral part of our work. The HHFL is rooted in Emory’s Serious Communicable Diseases Unit (SCDU), where in 2014, healthcare workers successfully treated the first patients with Ebola virus disease to arrive in the US. Joel Mumma, now the HHFL Research Director, worked with the SCDU and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to leverage human factors to understand how to better protect healthcare workers when removing Ebola-level personal protective equipment. These collaborations continued and expanded far beyond the SCDU to include all frontline healthcare workers and routine patient care.
In 2020, the Emory Healthcare Human Factors Lab was formally established to continue this work and address the unique challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, among other research projects, the HHFL is contributing to the scientific foundation underpinning the CDC’s Project Firstline, a massive initiative aimed at transforming infection prevention and control training for all 6 million US healthcare workers.
We believe human factors methods are a powerful tool in this endeavor, just as they can be in everyday problem solving in healthcare and in other forms of interdisciplinary research. This informs our commitment to education and training through partnerships with graduate programs across Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as fellowships for healthcare workers from Emory Healthcare.
Our Collaborators
