Human factors engineering: a tool for medical device evaluation in hospital procurement decision-making

A human factors evaluation was conducted to inform hospital procurement decision-making in selecting a general-purpose infusion pump to be used hospital-wide. Three infusion pumps from different vendors were involved in the evaluation, which consisted of two phases: a human factors heuristic assessment of the pumps according to several criteria, and user testing in five clinical areas. The clinical areas were: Oncology, Medical/Surgical, Pediatric, ICU, and Anaesthesiology. Fourteen nurses and three anaesthetists participated in the user testing. Reasonable agreement was observed between results of both phases of the evaluation, and overall results clearly favoured one of the infusion pumps over the others. It is recommended that a human factors evaluation should be performed to influence all hospital procurement decisions when purchasing medical devices, to ensure the best devices are selected for the end users and to ultimately enhance patient safety.