UW SHARP-C

HCDE/PARVAC is part of the team, led by the University of Texas at Houston Medical Center, that has been awarded the new National Center in Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD). This is one of four Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) centers awarded $15 million each for four years by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which is directly under Secretary Sebelius (HHS). The centers will work together to achieve breakthroughs in healthcare informatics by 2016 to improve national electronic medical record systems. The UW NCCD team is led by Keith Butler and Mark Haselkorn. Our work will focus on designing and developing technologies and methods that incorporate patient-centered issues and clinical process improvements into the software development of electronic medical record systems. Other UW partners on this are the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Ali Mokdad) and the School of Art (Axel Roesler).

NCCD's mission is to

1. bring together a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of researchers across the nation with the highest level of expertise in patient-centered cognitive support research from biomedical and health informatics, cognitive science, computer science, clinical sciences, industrial and systems engineering, human centered design and health services research;
2. conduct short-term research that addresses the urgent usability, workflow, and cognitive support issues of health information technology (HIT) as well as long-term, breakthrough research that can fundamentally remove the key cognitive barriers to HIT adoption and meaningful use; and
3. translate research findings to the real world through a cooperative program involving researchers, patients, providers, HIT vendors, and other stakeholders to maximize the benefits of HIT for healthcare quality, efficiency, and safety. NCCD is carrying out six research projects to directly and fundamentally address the cognitive challenges in HIT identified by ONC, focusing on work-centered design, cognitive foundations for decision making, adaptive decision support, model-based data summarization, visualization, and distributed team work.

Researchers at the University of Washington are leading four of six projects under NCCD Research Project 1, Work Centered Design of Care Process Improvements in HIT. These four projects are:

Project 3: Develop methods to improve adoption of electronic health record systems for clinical decision-making

Project 4: Model the impact of HIT on organizational healthcare processes

Project 5: Derive key HIT features from information usage patterns in care processes to "build-in" improvements of care to HIT systems

Project 6: Work ontology and formal verification of user-interaction

In support of these projects, Keith Butler and Mark Haselkorn are leading a directed research group under the directed research courses in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE 596 for graduate students/HCDE 496 for undergraduates).

Collaborators

• University of Texas at Houston Medical Center
• University of Washington, PARVAC
• Veterans Health Administration
• University of Michigan
• HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology