Cognitive Informatics: Reengineering Clinical Workflow for Safer and More Efficient Care (Health Informatics)

Kai Zheng, PhD, is Associate Professor of Informatics and Associate Adjunct Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. He also directs the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. Prior to joining UC Irvine, he was Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He was Director of University of Michigan’s Health Informatics Program preparing students for careers that will harness the power of information to enhance health and transform individual health and healthcare. Zheng’s research draws upon techniques from the fields of information systems and human–computer interaction to study the use of information, communication, and decision technologies in patient care delivery and management. His recent work has focused on topics such as interaction design,workflow and sociotechnical integration, and diffusion and evaluation of health IT. Zheng received his PhD degree in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of the 2011 American Medical Informatics Association New Investigator Award that recognizes early informatics contributions and significant scholarly achievements. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

Vimla L. Patel, PhD, DSc is the Director and Senior Research Scientist at Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She is Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University, and has adjunct professorial appointments at Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. She acts as a consultant to IBM. Trained as a cognitive scientist at McGill University, she subsequently served there as a Professor of Medicine and of Psychology. She has expertise in using cognitive methods to capture and analyze data to model clinical decision-making and evaluate human-computer interaction in the context of clinical workflow. Her more recent research addresses the nature of complexity in healthcare environment, and the use of appropriate methods of investigation for health IT intervention and patient safety. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences), the American College of MedicalInformatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. She is an Associate Editor of Journal of Biomedical Informatics and is on the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and Advances in Health Science Education.