This award supports the Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH); a two-day workshop held April 10-11, 2010 in conjunction with the 2010 ACM SIGCHI conference in Atlanta, GA (April 10-15, 2010). The primary intellectual contributions of this project lies in bringing together a diverse set of researchers from across a range of disciplines, all of which intersect around interactive systems for health and wellness. This workshop enables both in-depth discussion with a small group of senior-level individuals and the development and encouragement of a broader range of scholars. Bringing together these researchers during the workshop and during the conference poster session will facilitate interdisciplinary dialogs, creating an environment for critical intellectual exchange. There are short and long-term benefits from supporting this workshop. Focused discussions among senior researchers and practitioners are likely to lead to recommendations for the future directions of research, funding, policy, and education related to systems design of interactive systems for health and wellness. Further, bringing together early stage doctoral students with more senior researchers and practitioners will generate important new research projects and develop the future generation of researchers in this topic. In the long-term, addressing the complex interplay between human, organizational, and technological systems in healthcare has the potential to impact quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health systems throughout America.
In recent years, the medical informatics community has begun to recognize human-computer interaction (HCI) and better understanding of the social and human elements as important to a sound Health IT strategy. Meanwhile, research in human-computer interaction has found healthcare a rich and interesting domain of inquiry. Despite this progress, however, there exists a largely untapped potential to create deeper and more profound connections among the medical, informatics, human-computer interaction, medical sociology and anthropology communities. The Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH, http://chi2010.org/wish/) collocated with the ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors and Computing was an interdisciplinary workshop that took place over two days. This workshop included specialists in medical informatics, nursing informatics, medical sociology, human-computer interaction, and related fields The WISH co-chairs began working together in early 2009 to assemble a world-class steering committee and program for this first ever workshop. Papers were submitted by a wide variety of authors. The papers for accepted participants are available as part of the WISH proceedings, which were distributed at the conference and continue to be available on the CHI 2010 website (www.chi2010.org/wish/resources/WISH2010Proceedings.pdf) and via Amazon (www.amazon.com/Proceedings-International-Workshop-Interactive-Healthcare/dp/098262848X/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1305977128&sr=8-4). Selected papers were presented as either short talks (n=8) or interactive posters (n=38). The event was successful in stimulating discussion around Health IT and mentoring junior researchers and students. The discussions have resulted in the development of new presentations at other venues and the establishment of a Health Community at the primary human-computer interaction conference (ACM CHI).
