Why Can’t an ICU Be More Like a Cockpit? by Keith S. Karn

Here is an interesting blog post by Keith Karn about our human factors work in the ICU.

Cars' Black Box

The circumstance that led to more than 13 deaths linked to General Motors ignition switch defect will not be discussed in this post. However I would like to highlight the important part that the so called "black box" played in the investigation of these cases. 
The interaction between a complex technology and a human operator raise the need for an external, objective, source of information that can shed some light on what exactly happen during this interaction. Our default assumption that the technology part of the system was operating as expected and that the human operator is prone for error, need a reliable source of information that will tell us what actually happen. Now we just have to make sure that the 'black box" capture all the information that we need in order to understand what happened.