The Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) 2013: Bridging Communities will take place on November 16 in Washington DC in conjunction with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2013 Annual Symposium. This one-day, in-person event is designed to foster conversation and bridge communities, and will include experts in biomedical informatics, nursing informatics, medical sociology, human-computer interaction, and other related fields. The goals of this workshop are consistent with those of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). By bringing together researchers from a diversity of disciplines that intersect with Interactive Systems for Healthcare, the primary intellectual contribution of this workshop will emerge from the in-depth discussion of challenges facing cross-disciplinary research. Furthermore, providing an environment for these researchers to communicate and exchange ideas and experiences will stimulate and support the development of interdisciplinary dialogs and collaborations. This will in turn lead to constructive progress on every project discussed at WISH. Overall, this workshop will contribute both short and long-term benefits to the community. In the short term, workshop participants, particularly the presenting participants, will receive feedback to improve their project and the knowledge will also be shared with attendees of the AMIA Annual Symposium. In the long term, we expect that WISH participants will give back to the community by engaging more individuals in research involving Interactive Systems and Healthcare. Furthermore, we hope that government agencies-including funding, policy, and service agencies such as AHRQ-will find the research presented at the workshop useful to help to inform future research directions.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)'s mission of improving quality, safety, efficiency and effectiveness for healthcare for all Americans is well aligned with considerations of Health Information Technology (HIT) and Interactive Systems for Healthcare. However, despite decades of research in the human, social, and organizational aspects of medical and health technologies, there still exists a largely untapped potential to create deeper and more profound connections among the medical, biomedical informatics, human-computer interaction, medical sociology and anthropology communities. Consequently, this proposal requests support for a one-day, in-person interdisciplinary research symposium, Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) 2013: Bridging Communities, to be collocated with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2013 Annual Symposium, in November of 2013 in Washington DC. This workshop will include experts in biomedical informatics, nursing informatics, medical sociology, human- computer interaction, and other related fields. The co-location with the AMIA Annual Symposium will ensure that we bring together participants from diverse disciplines.
