I'm pleased to report that I have received a dissertation award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). A description of the dissertation project follows.

User Interfaces for Communicating Inpatient Medication Therapies
There has been limited research to date that explores the impact of providing hospitalized patients with access to health information technology. This research will yield new insights into how such technology can be used to educate and engage hospitalized patients and their families, by developing a tablet-computer-based user interface with which hospitalized patients and their families can review their medication information. It will advance scientific knowledge in the field of patient-clinician communication, demonstrate new technical capabilities for sharing information among patients and their care team, and explore potential improvements to patient engagement, knowledge, and satisfaction.



The screenshot above shows the welcome screen of a custom inpatient version of our institution's personal health record portal, developed with David Vawdrey and Oliver Yang (data shown here is for a sample patient). I am currently extending the inpatient portal to support patient-friendly views of medication therapies.

Initiating a search for online health information can lead to overwhelming long web pages and health articles. We found that it is feasible to extract short summary sentences from online sources, and surveyed both physicians and patients to understand features of quality summaries.
 


The quality of hospital care that patients receive has been shown to be dramatically affected by their basic understanding of clinical events. Electronic health records are beginning to make vast amounts of data available to clinicians, but there is also a tremendous opportunity to use information in the electronic health record to directly impact patient experience. We explored patient-facing views of health record information, formatted for large, in-room, information displays. 

This Health Tech Today video showcases patient-centered software prototypes developed at Microsoft Research. The demo of the patient information software showing 'What's Next', medication information, and lab information are based on our formative study and design work in an urban emergency department.

We've got an impressive Steering Committee lined up for the upcoming workshop and CHI 2010 is a great place for this event. There's a Call for Participation out now for presenting work. However, the event is open to the entire CHI community on the 11th.

Date: April 11, 2010 Website: http://chi2010.org/wish Location: Collocated with CHI 2010 in Atlanta, GA

Check out our interactive poster:

CURRENT TOPICS IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD RESEARCH

 

David K. Vawdrey, PhD, Lauren Wilcox, MS, Daniel M. Stein, MD, MA, Sarah Collins, RN, PhD, Lena Mamykina, PhD, Stewin Camargo, Mathew R. Fred, MD, George Hripcsak, MD, MS

 at the upcoming event:

Electronic Health Records: Where Do We Go From Here?

Friday, February 5, 2010 | 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
The New York Academy of Sciences

Presented by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Center for Advanced Information Management, Columbia University

I've migrated to Movable Type 4.32. So far, integrating the flash components that I wanted to keep from the previous flash-based design has gone smoothly. The blog infrastructure is pretty flexible and I'm excited about having all of my services and components in place.

All information from the previous site has been restored here. New content is on the way!