Context Sensitive Health Informatics: Redesigning Healthcare Work

Book excerpt: Health informatics applications will be a cornerstone of the next generation healthcare delivery system. These applications will support the delivery of safe, patient-centered care, and collaborative care delivery. The complexity of modern healthcare is delivered by many different specialties, to many different patients with complex diseases and comorbidity. A one size fits all approach is not adequate to reach the triple aim of improving the patient experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare. Health informatics applications must rather be built to be adaptable and sensitive to the complex contexts where they will be used. The health informatics community has long been interested in the role that context plays in the design, implementation and evaluation of Health IT. We have come to realize that context is not just a passive characteristic that impacts Health IT usage but rather is embedded in the core of the users, processes and outcomes that Health IT interacts with. Therefore, we need better approaches to study and understand its impact on Health IT usage in different healthcare settings. This book contains the conference papers from CSHI 2017 - Delivering 21st Century Healthcare - Building a Quality-and-Efficiency Driven System. It contains papers on a variety of topics that are divided into four sections: Theoretical approaches to investigate context sensitive health informatics to generate robust evidence, Redesigning healthcare work practices, Patient participation in healthcare design and redesign, and Human factors and usability. The 2017 CSHI conference continues our efforts to develop robust scientific evidence on context and Health IT.