HH Grand Rounds: Lukasz Mazur, Radiation Oncology, UNC School of Medicine

Title:
Engineering Patient Safety in Healthcare Settings

Brief Overview: The recent adoption of health information technology (health-IT) has been a mixed blessing for patient safety. Indeed, human errors during interactions with health-IT have become one of the top patient safety concerns. Therefore, in this talk, I will overview promising prototypes to ‘optimize’ cognitive workload and performance during providers’ interactions with health-IT.   Specifically, I will use examples from Radiation therapy (RT) which is used to treat ≈ 50% of patients with cancer, and errors in planning/delivery are estimated to occur in ≈ 5% of the > ≈600,000 patients receiving radiation therapy per year in the US. RT has been highly dependent on health-IT for decades, with essentially all of our critical clinical and QA tasks being done in an electronic environment. Thus, the lessons from this talk will be also generalizable to other areas of medicine and beyond that are also becoming more reliant on health-IT.

Speaker:
Lukasz Mazur, PhD
Associate Professor Radiation Oncology, UNC School of Medicine
Adjunct Assistant Professor Health Policy and Management
Adjunct Assistant Professor Biomedical Engineering
Adjunct Assistant Professor School of Information and Library Science

Biography:
Dr. Lukasz Mazur earned his BS, MS and PhD in industrial and management engineering from Montana State University.  He is an assistant professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Library and Information Science (SILS) and in the UNC-Chapel Hill Radiation Oncology Department in the UNC School of Medicine. His research interests include healthcareengineering management as it pertains to continuous quality and patient safety efforts in healthcare and human factor engineering with a focus on workload and individual performance during health care providers’ interactions with health information technology.  His research has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to develop simulation-based training and innovative usability enhancements to improve patient safety. While at the North Carolina State University, Lukasz was awarded the prestigious Alumni Outstanding Extension Service Award for his outreach work in healthcare industry, highlighting his passion for patient safety and operational improvements.

Expertise and Interests:
healthcare engineering management, continuous quality improvement, patient safety, workload, human performance, human factors, simulation-based training.

Join us in HHIVE lab as Lukasz Mazur discusses medical errors and patient safety in our last Grand Rounds talk of the semester.

Light refreshments provided.