Complexity Estimation Protocol for Diagnostic Tasks Undertaken in Emergency Medicine Settings

Medical diagnosis requires the undertaking of decision-making tasks of varying complexity. A significant source of such complexity is the objective factors that represent the inherent task characteristics and the clinical context in which the task is undertaken. While existing task complexity research has mentioned these inherent factors, it has not explicitly stated the identifying criteria required to identify these factors from collected qualitative data. There is also a critical gap persisting in terms of a well-defined protocol to measure objective task complexity in a clinical context. This study proposes a protocol to estimate the objective complexity of diagnostic tasks in an emergency medicine setting. To do this, we expanded a prior task complexity conceptualisation framework that states 27 inherent task and context-dependent factors and defined the identifying criteria for each of those factors. The protocol was developed through a site study at an emergency medicine department in India. This protocol can be used by behavioural designers, human factors researchers and medical experts to evaluate the complexity of diagnostic tasks in emergency medicine and potentially other healthcare settings.