Electronic Reporting of Workplace Violence Incidents: Improving the Usability, and Optimizing Healthcare Workers’ Cognitive Workload, and Performance

A majority of healthcare workers (HCWs) experience workplace violence (WPV) but most WPV events go unreported. Underreporting of WPV is well documented in the literature as a barrier to identifying underlying causes and to evaluating the effectiveness of WPV interventions. Previous studies suggest that WPV reporting data is fragmentary, unreliable, and inconsistent. Also, WPV reporting systems are suboptimally designed making it difficult for healthcare workers to report WPV incidents. This study aims to assess the usability of an electronic WPV report in a large academic medical center and the perceived cognitive workload (CWL) and performance of HCWs associated with reporting WPV events. Findings from this study suggest that our institutional WPV report has suboptimal perceived usability and suboptimal perceived cognitive workload. Further, participants with training reported lower error rates in comparison to participants without training on performance.