Complexity and Health Technology Safety Elizabeth M. BORYCKI a, 1 , Amr FARGHALI a and Andre W. KUSHNIRUK a a School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada Abstract. In many ways health technology safety has improved significantly over the past few decades. Yet, we still have examples of incidents where safety of health technology systems of care have led to possible and actual safety incidents. In this paper we examine the complexity of errors in an increasingly complex and digitized system of care. Although safety incidents are decreasing over time due to improvements in the tools used to support care, they still occur. Simple safety incidents prevailed in the 2005. Today, incident reports suggest complexity has emerged as an important issue that needs to be addressed in order to make further healthcare industry safety gains. Keywords. Patient safety, health technology, health technology safety, technology- induced error, complexity 1. Introduction Publically available text based incident reports represent an important opportunity to learn about new and emerging types of safety issues involving software and medical devices. Incident reports may provide insights into the changing nature of health technology safety events (or technology-induced errors) and the factors that contribute to their occurrence [1, 2]. There is a need to understand the technologies and processes that lead to an error(s) so that future errors are prevented [3, 4]. In this paper we explore the nature of technology-induced errors in a modern health technology system from the perspective of complexity as the first step in a process of finding specific safety solutions. The objectives of this research are: (1) to identify the factors that contribute to a technology-induced error, and (2) to explore the nature of technology-induced errors in a modern, health technology system from the perspective of complexity. 2. Literature Review Safety has emerged as an important issue for designers and developers of health technology systems. The digitization of healthcare systems has placed pressure on health informatics professionals to learn from safety events to improve the technologies they are designing, developing, implementing and maintaining to support patient care. Early research focused on proving that technology-induced errors exist [4]. A number of studies followed that described the phenomena [1-4]. Descriptions of technology- induced errors were translated into usable definitions; for example, some researchers defined technology-induced errors as those errors that have their origins in technology 1 Corresponding Author, Elizabeth M. Borycki, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada; E-mail: emb@uvic.ca Advances in Informatics, Management and Technology in Healthcare J. Mantas et al. (Eds.) © 2022 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI220787 551