Cerner Corporation / Human Factors Researcher

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Cerner Corporation

Position: Human Factors Researcher

Dates: Aug. 2019 – Mar. 2022

Cerner Corp. is most well known for developing Electronic Healthcare / Medical Record software, and providing related IT services in that realm, to healthcare organizations. Cerner is primarily a business to business service provider.

My position at Cerner was Human Factors Researcher. My primary responsibilities involved designing and performing human subject research studies to assess the safety and usability of Cerner’s product offerings, and providing recommendations for improvements. Much of my work was focused on digital “medical device” products. They were considered medical devices because, while they were software products, their impact on medical decision making, and the level of risk associated with those decisions, met / exceeded regulatory thresholds to be classified as medical devices.

This position at Cerner provided me with great research experience. Having the opportunity to improve healthcare by conducting usability testing, interviewing users, performing task analyses, etc…, was a rewarding experience; one which has many applications in a broad range of fields, certainly manufacturing.

Responsibilities

  • Responsible for all stages of conducting human subject research studies
    • Planning (locating potential areas of improvement, choosing a research method to investigate with, creating a documented research plan, etc…)
    • Recruiting (provided recruiting guidelines and assisted in locating participant resources, but primary recruitment efforts handled by internal recruiting team)
    • Conducting research (moderating usability studies, running task analyses, facilitating interviews, etc.)
    • Analyzing collected data (utilizing qualitative and/or quantitative analysis methods to understand and find patterns in the data collected)
    • Reporting the findings (writing up summary reports and creating presentations to present the study findings to various stakeholders, writing regulatory reports where applicable to support filings for FDA and EU submissions)
  • Create and maintain documentation for research in my product group
    • Research plans
    • Usability specification documentation
    • Findings reports
    • Documentation tracking product research conducted, potential future research, findings implemented, and findings not implemented
  • Team / process improvement efforts
    • Worked with a small team to improve our research storage solutions
    • Worked on developing standardized processes for some research methods
    • Completed 3rd party training initiatives (Nielsen Norman Group UX certification and Crucial Conversations training.
  • Team knowledge growth
    • Investigated unutilized / underutilized research methods and presented to the team to increase our method assets
    • Investigated and pushed for the use of “big data” collection methods to increase the statistical significance of our quantitative data assessments and allow for passive data collection where possible, as passive data collection had the potential to save Cerner a great deal of money and time in our areas of research
  • Mentoring
    • Mentored peers where applicable

Skills / Tools

  • Research methods (formative and summative methods utilized)
    • Usability testing
    • Task analysis
    • Cognitive task analysis
    • Interviews (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured)
    • Card sorting
    • Tree tests
    • Heuristic analysis
    • Design reviews
  • R (statistics software)
  • Webex
  • Teams
  • Qualtrics
  • UserZoom
  • JAZZ (software platform)
  • Multitasking
  • Time management
  • Team building
  • Microsoft Office
    • Word
    • Excel
    • PowerPoint
    • Outlook