Introduction

We have written Medical Device Use Error: Root Cause Analysis as a guide for human factors specialists and other professionals who are responsible for determining the causes of mistakes that people make when interacting with medical devices. We aspired to make the book a helpful complement to many other excellent books on the topic of root cause analysis (see the “Resources” section at the end of the book). We hope this book is particularly useful to readers in the field of human factors engineering (often referred to as HFE in shorthand) who work in the medical device industry.