How colour-coded observation charts pioneered by UQ researchers are helping save more lives in hospitals.
We’ve all seen movies or TV shows in which a doctor picks up a patient’s observation chart, gives it a quick once over and instantly orders a test or treatment. Observation charts have an air of mystique about them; full of symbols and information only medical professionals can decipher.
In reality, however, it turns out these charts are less Grey’s Anatomy and more grey area.
“Observation charts were generally designed by clinicians with no particular human factors or psychology training,” says Professor Mark Horswill from UQ’s School of Psychology.
He says that can lead to complications that could have been picked up earlier being missed.
“You get people being monitored on these charts, and then they deteriorate or have a negative outcome, and so the question was why were these clinical staff missing so many of these warning signs?”
This was a question that puzzled Marcus Watson, an Honorary Associate Professor at the School of Psychology and former Executive Director of the Clinical Skills Development Service in Queensland Health Metro North.
In 2009, he set out to answer it by recruiting Professor Horswill and another colleague from the School of Psychology, Dr Andrew Hill, to examine the design of these crucial charts that measure heart rate, blood pressure, temperature and more.
“Everything was a grid of numbers, and it’s very hard when you’re confronted with a table like that to easily spot when any of those numbers is outside the normal range, even for highly experienced people,” Professor Horswill says.
“Marcus realised, hang on – there’s a problem here clinicians are trying to solve that is actually a problem psychologists could have some valuable input into, and that’s when we set up our group.”
The team secured funding from the Queensland Health and Australian Commission for Safety and Quality of Healthcare to investigate how observation charts could be made more user-friendly and life-saving.
It's an area Professor Horswill is well-qualified to advise on, having previously used his knowledge of human behaviours to solve real-world problems and reduce harm. With a primary research focus on reducing road crash deaths, he led a team tha developed a hazard perception test that was found to reduce novice driver crashes by 13 per cent and is now a compulsory part of Queensland’s driver licensing process.
Professor Horswill and the team proposed that the typical blocky, black-and-white chart design was adding to the ‘cognitive load’ for clinicians, meaning crucial details about a patient's safety were more likely to be overlooked.
“Psychology and human factors are able to tell us how many things people can hold in their short term memory at any one time, how people’s attention is drawn to some things but not others, and how people prioritise and aggregate information,” he says.
“As you start exceeding what our very limited cognitive load can handle, then people start making all sorts of mistakes.”
Using this information, Horswill’s team designed the Adult Deterioration Detection System (ADDS) chart to allow clinicians to plot data on a graph with coloured backgrounds.
For example, if a heart rate reading goes above a certain level, it will cross into a new coloured section, denoting what should happen next to help the patient.
“What you’re essentially doing is removing the need for the clinician to memorise the cut-offs for abnormal and normal readings, because they can literally see it right there on the page,” he says.
Professor Horswill says vital signs can also be scored individually, then added together.
“That gives you a number, which is essentially a summary of the physiological status of the patient, how sick they are overall, and you can use that number to decide whether to take action or not,” he explains.
“With our chart, clinicians can see much more clearly at a glance whether the person is in trouble or not, and they don’t need years and years of experience to do so.”
Professor Horswill says it’s a simple solution that allows doctors to work faster and smarter.
“The redesigned charts help them figure out what’s actually wrong with the patient, rather than filling their heads with the cut-offs they’re trying to memorise,” he says.
“There’s no high-tech here. By simply understanding how human behaviour works and how humans process information, you can have enormous impacts that can save people’s lives.”
That’s certainly what the chart did during hospital trials, with researchers using eye-tracking to monitor how clinicians’ used it.
Nambour Hospital saw an 11 per cent decrease in overall mortality across the whole facility, while Waikato Hospital in New Zealand saw a 45 per cent reduction in cardiac arrests.
“We put our chart side-by-side with a range of other charts, all of which were produced by health professionals, and found that our chart had about a third of the number of errors as some of the other charts,” Professor Horswill says.
Versions of the ADDS chart, adapted for specific requirements, are now used in around 180 public hospitals and primary health care centres in Queensland, with some private hospitals also seeing their value.
The charts have also begun rolling out nationwide.
Professor Horswill says the ADDS chart project was a satisfying moment of collaboration that is having transformational impact.
“The most satisfying part of this project is how our academic work translated so fast into real world outcomes," he says.
"There are people potentially alive now, who would otherwise not be, thanks to changing the arrangement of information on a piece of paper."
