Identifying and addressing effectiveness in a user-centered design of voluntary medical incident reporting system

Two major challenges to current voluntary medical incident reporting system (VMIR) are underreporting and low quality reports, which make it difficult for health providers to effective use and learn from mistakes for patient safety improvement. According to prior researches on a variety of voluntary system design and usage in different domains such as aviation, system usability and utility were considered as significant contributing factors that influence the system acceptance. However, the published studies of dealing with these factors to maximize system acceptance and effectiveness in medical incident reporting domain are few and fragmented. In this study, we elaborated the background and problems in target domain of medical incident reporting firstly, and then synthesized practical and academic instance by unobtrusive data analysis and literature review to propose a design framework to the future applications. Finally, a developing computer-based prototype as a partial solution of proposed design was paraphrased to illustrate our initial progress on user-centered design of VMIR. It is expected to increase reporting efficiency and data quality that will promote a learning culture and help remove shame-blame barriers in collecting patient safety events.