Description:

CBITs Seminar Series presents Dr. Madhu Reddy, NU Communication Studies  
 “Collaboration and Health Infrastructure: A Socio-Technical Puzzle”

Abstract:  Developing an effective health technology infrastructure 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 outcomes. Technologies such as the electronic medical record are considered vital to the success of the healthcare system. Although these technologies can certainly help in addressing many problems that plague healthcare, they often face challenges in supporting an important aspect of healthcare work – collaboration. Consequently, users have had to develop workarounds and other approaches to address these challenges.

In this presentation, I will discuss two studies where I have applied methods and concepts from the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) to examine the relationship between collaboration, health information technologies (HIT), and workflow in hospitals. From these and other studies, my colleagues and I have developed a Collaboration Space Model to help us begun to understand how we can “operationalize” collaboration. 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.