Risk identification by physicians and developers - differences investigated in a controlled experiment

Risk management is an important process and risk identification is an important part of this process, especially in development of medical software. This paper presents an experiment where physicians, developers and software developers for medical devices are asked to identify risk in a given scenario describing the procurement of a patient monitoring system. It is concluded that multiple roles and thereby different experiences, will affect the risk identification process. Involving multiple roles, for example users and developers in the risk identification process, will result in a more complete set of identified risks than if only one role is included in the process.