Mission | Affiliation | People | Facilities | History
The mission of Research in Patient Safety is to conduct research in human factors and information technologies to improve safety and health care operations. We strive for excellence in three research areas: patient safety, care coordination, and information technology. It is a multi-disciplinary program that integrates human factors, technology, and medicine.
The Division of Research in Patient Safety current receives over $2.2M research support from National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Army Research Institute, and NASA. The most recent award (PI: Peter Hu) was from DoD on pre-hospital data collection and mining. Over the last 18 months, the Division published 14 peer reviewed journal papers, mostly in first tier journals in their respective fields (Appendix I), such as, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Journal of Trauma.
Research in Patient Safety (RPS) is part of Program in Trauma, one of seven programs in University of Maryland School of Medicine. The Division has received tremendous support from hospitals, Program in Trauma and Department of Anesthesiology. All faculty members in Research in Patient Safety are appointed at the Department of Anesthesiology.
The Division currently has three faculty level investigators (Yan Xiao, Peter Hu, and Ayse Gurses), supported by a multi-media technician (Steve Seebode) and administrative assistant (David Overturf). The Division has usually 2-5 graduate level research assistants and 1-2 undergraduate research assistants. Some of the students are from degree programs around Baltimore areas, and some are from universities far away.
There is a long tradition of collaboration within the University and with other universities. Nearly all projects have been collaborative.
The Division of Research in Patient Safety is currently located in Anesthesiology Research Labs and will relocate to the R Adam Cowley Shock Trauma Center, amidst of the highly dynamic trauma clinical environments. The Division has Electronics Lab, System Development Lab and Video Lab (total 850 sqft). The laboratories are used for hardware and software development, video data analysis, and system integration. We currently maintain six servers on-site for serving documents, archived video-files, live streaming media, and live GPS tracking data and wireless data transfer used in research projects. In addition, we maintain a number of computer programming development workstations and computer-hardware prototype environments for specific project development.
The Division has extraordinary research access to clinical settings, including:
- Telecontrol Room
- Audio Video Data acquisition at the Shock Trauma Center
- VideoBoard system for the 6-OR surgical unit of the Shock Trauma Center
- VideoBoard system for the 19-OR general unit of University of Maryland Medical Center
The Division of Research in Patient Safety was established in 2005, in conjunction of Clinical and Outcome Research led by Grant Bochicchio, a clinician researcher who directs a surgical intensive care unit. The Division leverages the synergy between clinical research with human factors in Program in Trauma. The Division has received tremendous support from Program in Trauma leadership as well others.
Prior to 2005, the research group was Human Factors and Technology Research in Anesthesia Research Lab, with a history to early 1990’s in decision making and team performance as led by Colin Mackenzie, a well known patient safety researcher and an anesthesiologist. Early seminal research was funded by Office of Naval Research.
Research in human factors, team performance, and patient safety conducted by the group has been funded by:
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