Human factors engineer at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Houston Methodist Hospital's Center for Outcomes Research when this study was conducted.
Senior scientific writer at the Houston Methodist Hospital's Center for Outcomes Research (and was a senior research assistant there when the study was conducted) and is a research associate in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Ethics Hum Res. 2020 Nov;42(6):2-13. doi: 10.1002/eahr.500068.
This article describes the process of designing, approving, and conducting an investigator-initiated protocol to use an eye-tracking device in a health care setting. Participants wore the device, which resembles eyeglasses, in a front-facing manner in an intensive care unit for the study of personnel gaze patterns, producing a visual record of workflow. While the data of interest for our study was not specifically the health information protected by the privacy rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a wide variety of such data was captured by the eye-tracking device, and the prospective consent of all people who might have been incidentally videotaped was not feasible. The protocol therefore required attention to unique ethical considerations-including consent, privacy and confidentiality, HIPAA compliance, institutional liability, and the use of secondary data. The richness of eye-tracker data suggests various beneficial applications in health care occupational research and quality improvement. Therefore, sharing our study's successful design and execution, including proactive researcher-institutional review board communication, can inform and encourage similarly valuable, ethical, and innovative audiovisual research techniques.
本文描述了设计、批准和实施一项由研究人员发起的协议的过程，该协议旨在在医疗保健环境中使用眼动追踪设备。参与者在重症监护病房以正面的方式佩戴类似于眼镜的设备，以研究人员的注视模式，生成工作流程的视觉记录。虽然我们研究的相关数据并非受《健康保险携带和责任法案》（HIPAA）隐私规则保护的具体健康信息，但眼动追踪设备确实捕获了各种各样的此类数据，而且对可能被偶然录像的所有人进行前瞻性同意是不可行的。因此，该协议需要关注独特的伦理问题，包括同意、隐私和保密性、HIPAA 合规性、机构责任以及二次数据的使用。眼动追踪器数据的丰富性表明，它在医疗保健职业研究和质量改进中有各种有益的应用。因此，分享我们研究的成功设计和执行，包括研究人员与机构审查委员会的积极沟通，可以为类似有价值、符合伦理和创新的视听研究技术提供信息和鼓励。
