Description:

Health information technology (HIT) is often viewed as the “silver bullet” that will solve many problems in healthcare including lowering costs, reducing medical errors, increasing patient safety, and improving patient care. Technologies such as the electronic medical record and computerized patient order entry system are now considered vital to a hospital’s success. Although these and other types of HIT can certainly help in addressing many problems that plague healthcare, they often face challenges in supporting an important aspect of the work in hospitals – collaboration. Consequently, users have had to develop workarounds and other approaches to address these challenges.

In this presentation, I will discuss a set of studies where I have applied methods and concepts from the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) to examine the relationship between collaboration, HIT, and workflow in hospitals. I will argue that in order to design HIT that effectively supports collaboration, we need to view these technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using this perspective, we can more effectively address the challenges of designing and implementing collaborative HIT as well as take advantage of the opportunities that these technologies can provide.

Speaker: Dr. Madhu Reddy is a Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Communication Studies and a faculty member in the Center for Communication and Health. Previously, he was in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University and helped start Penn State’s Center for Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems. Dr. Reddy received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. His primary research interests are at the intersections of Medical Informatics and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Dr. Reddy is especially interested in the design, implementation, and adoption of healthcare technologies in highly collaborative and information-intensive clinical settings. He has published his research in both the Medical Informatics and CSCW communities. Dr. Reddy has won the American Medical Informatics Association’s Diana Forsythe Award in 2002 and 2010. In 2009, Dr. Reddy received the U.S. National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for young investigators – the Faculty Early Career Development Award. Through his research, he hopes to provide a better understanding of collaboration and collaborative technologies in clinical settings to researchers and practitioners in medical informatics, CSCW, and other fields.