Human factors engineering in computerized mental health care delivery

There has been strong clinical resistance to the use of automation in mental health. At least part of the resistance may be due to the researcher’s failure to understand the psychological factors involved in the human-computer relationship. This paper reviews human factors research as it may be related to computerized systems in mental health. Human factors considerations are specifically applied to: design and implementation of computer systems, patient-computer interaction, mental health staff-computer interaction, and computer output.