Dissertation: Not Right Now: Factors Affecting Interruption Decisions in a Healthcare Paradigm

Interruptions are common in the workplace, but when they happen during high-stakes critical tasks, they can have serious consequences. In the field of healthcare, interruptions can lead to serious adverse events or medication errors. Research on interruption management strategies addresses the potentially harmful outcomes of interruptions but often fails to account for the initial decision to accept or reject the interrupting task. Two experiments were performed to examine the decision-making outcomes for interruptions.

In experiment I, the participants monitored two EKG displays while simultaneously entering medication information into a patient chart. The decision to accept or reject an interruption was investigated using three moderators: priority, cost of the interruption, and method of the interruption. Priority results are in support of expectancy-valence theory such that high priority interruptions were accepted more than low priority. Low-cost interruptions were accepted more than high-cost which shows that tasks that were close by were performed more than tasks located further away, The results were consistent with expectations and showed a significant difference for decision-making in which high priority, low-cost, and face-to-face tasks, were accepted more frequently.

In experiment II, the joint effects among the three moderators were examined with the addition of mental workload as a moderator. According to the memory for goals model, more interrupting tasks were expected to be accepted in the low workload condition. The results demonstrated that high priority and low-cost tasks strongly influenced the decision to accept interruptions. Low workload tasks and alarm interruptions were also more likely to be accepted but with smaller effect sizes. Both experiments provide evidence that the priority and cost moderators have a strong effect on interruption decisions, but the effect for workload was weaker and there were mixed effects for the interruption method. This research is a steppingstone to understanding how various moderators impact the decision to accept or reject an interruption. Knowledge of how these moderators influence decision-making outcomes may help create work environments where important interruptions are accepted, and nuisance interruptions are more likely to be rejected.