This is funding to support a one day interdisciplinary Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare 2011 (WISH 2011), to be held on October 22, 2011 in conjunction with the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). The workshop will bring together a diverse set of researchers from a range of disciplines, all of whom do research relevant to the development of Interactive Systems for Healthcare but who rarely have opportunities to interact. Attendees will include specialists in medical informatics, nursing informatics, medical sociology, human-computer interaction, and related fields. The goal is to promote interdisciplinary exchange of ideas about this important area of research and to advance the development of new healthcare technologies.
Participants will be selected through a peer review process based on materials submitted in response to the call for papers. The submission materials include a five-page paper in the AMIA submission format, including an abstract and a description of the participant¨Vs research. The papers for accepted participants will be available as part of the WISH proceedings. Selected papers will be presented as either short talks or interactive posters.
Broader impacts: Addressing the complex interplay between human, organizational, and technological systems in healthcare is an important research area with the potential to impact quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care in America. The workshop will improve attendees' current research projects through interdisciplinary feedback from other workshop participants, promote this area of research more generally through its visibility at the AMIA conference, lead to new interdisciplinary collaborations that can advance medical informatics, and help educate graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who want to work in this area. A workshop website and proceedings will make the content widely available to other researchers and the general public.
Overview Health Information Technologies (HIT) have an enormous potential to transform healthcare and have a positive impact on its quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. However, despite the ongoing efforts by many government agencies, HIT continue to experience low levels of adoption. Moreover, a growing body of research questions its impact on medical care quality, efficiency and costs, examines unintended consequences, and medical errors due to poorly designed computing systems. Many researchers argue that these negative consequences are due to a mismatch between clinical work as it is conducted in the real clinical practice and the structure of computing applications that are meant to support it. The second interdisciplinary research symposium Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare 2011 (WISH 2011) (http://wish2011.wordpress.com/) was collocated with the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), in October 22, 2011. This workshop included specialists in biomedical informatics, nursing informatics, medical sociology, human-computer interaction, and related fields. The co-location with AMIA Fall Symposium ensured continuing focus on bridging gaps between research communities and attracted new set of diverse participants. The steering committee for WISH 2011 included members of the steering committee of WISH 2010, and additional individuals to ensure more comprehensive representation of the diverse communities. The structure of the workshop was similar to the one used in WISH 2010 and include keynote presentations, invited panels, and technical talks selected through a peer-review process. Intellectual Merit of WISH 2011 The primary intellectual contribution of this project lies in bringing together a diverse set of researchers from across a range of disciplines, all of which intersect with Interactive Systems for Healthcare. Bringing together these researchers supports the development of interdisciplinary dialogs, creating an environment for exchange and conversation that further enables progress on every project represented at WISH. Addressing the complex interplay between human, organizational, and technological systems in healthcare is a significant research area with the potential to impact quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care in America. Given the recent emphasis on HIT solutions as part of efforts towards health care reform and in conjunction with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), these issues are timely and of the utmost priority to be addressed. Medical informatics, human-computer interaction, and other HIT researchers, however, can be trapped in their disciplinary silos, however, making significant trans-disciplinary progress challenging. This workshop marked a significant step towards integrating these communities and ensuring the types of cross-pollination of both research and practical ideas needed to make that progress. This workshop was a second in a series of workshops with the goal of brining together different communities of researchers and practitioners interested in studying, designing, and evaluation interactive systems in healthcare. The major differentiating factor of this second workshop was its transition from ACM Conference on Human-Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) to Annual Symposium of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). This transition helped us to reach the biomedical informatics community that does not usually attend CHI conferences. The workshop received such warm reception by AMIA board and members that this year AMIA hosted a third such workshop WISH 2012. We hope that our continuing efforts will turn WISH into an ongoing successful venue for multi-disciplinary research communities to present their work, exchange opinions, and form collaborations. The Broader Impact of WISH 2011 We believe the workshop already had considerable impact on society, and the respective research communities. In the short term, the workshop allowed a group of researchers selected through peer review process to present their work and receive feedback from their colleagues. In addition, the mentorship program helped a number of junior researchers to discuss their work with distinguished members of the research community and receive personalized feedback and career guidance. In the long term, it already let to new initiatives such as WISH 2012 (the third workshop in the series), and inspired new activities, for example a student design competition proposed for AMIA 2013.
