Sorry to post two NYTimes.com articles back to back, but they happen to both be relevant to design.

This article describes how GE’s lack of product usability coupled with poor product instructional design, and flavored with a dash of incompetence on the part of the hospital technicians, has led to numerous cases of over-irradiation. It’s sad. And in my opinion, the primary fault lies with GE.

Normally, the more radiation a CT scan uses, the better the image. But amid concerns that patients are getting more radiation than necessary, the medical community has embraced the idea of using only enough to obtain an image sufficient for diagnosis.

To do that, GE offers a feature on its CT scanner that can automatically adjust the dose according to a patient’s size and body part. It is, a GE manual says, “a technical innovation that significantly reduces radiation dose.”

At Cedars-Sinai and Glendale Adventist, technicians used the automatic feature — rather than a fixed, predetermined radiation level — for their brain perfusion scans.

But a surprise awaited them: when used with certain machine settings that govern image clarity, the automatic feature did not reduce the dose — it raised it.

When a company designs and builds a medical instrument/equipment whose function poses an inherent medical risk, that company is responsible for ensuring that the use of the instrument/equipment has been usability tested. In other words, the company should run end-users of the instrument/equipent thought usability studies, in the context of work, in order to ensure that the instrument/equipment is indeed usable, and to evidence areas where the instrument/equipment might cause it’s end-users to error.

I wouldn’t be surprised if GE had neglected to test their gear before unleashing into the hands of ill-trained technicians, who then nuked the brains of unsuspecting and frantic stroke victims.

This kind of thing roils me. It’s like the combination of a Don Norman debate, and a Norman Bate’s moment.