Enormous advances in information technology have permeated essentially all facets of life in the past two decades. Formidable challenges remain in fostering tools that enhance productivity but are sensitive to work practices. Cognitive Informatics (CI) is the multidisciplinary study of cognition, information and computational sciences that investigates all facets of human computing including design and computer-mediated intelligent action, thus is strongly grounded in methods and theories from cognitive science. As an applied discipline, it has a close affiliation with human factors and human-computer interaction, and provides a framework for the analysis and modeling of complex human performance in technology-mediated settings and contributes to the design and development of better information systems. In recent years, CI has emerged as a distinct area with special relevance to biomedicine and health care. In addition, it has become a foundation for education and training of health informaticians, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology initiating a program including CI as one of its critical elements to support health IT curriculum development. This book represents a first textbook on cognitive informatics and will focus on key examples drawn from the application of methods and theories from CI to challenges pertaining to the practice of critical-care medicine (CCM). Technology is transforming critical care workflows and re-organizing patient care management processes. CCM has proven to be a fertile test bed for theories and methods of cognitive informatics. CI, in turn, has contributed much to our understanding of the factors that result in complexity and patient errors. The topic is strongly interdisciplinary and will be important for individuals from a range of academic and professional backgrounds, including critical care specialists, psychologists, computer scientists, medical informaticians, and anthropologists.

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary science concerned with understanding and utilizing models of cognition. It has spawned a great dealof research on applications such as expert systems and intelligent tutoring systems, and has interacted closely with psychological research. However, it is generally accepted that it is difficult to apply cognitive-scientific models to medical training and practice. This book is based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Italy in 1991, the purpose of which was to examine the impact ofmodels of cognition on medical training and practice and to outline future research programmes relating cognition and education, and in particular to consider the potential impact of cognitive science on medical training and practice. A major discovery presented in the book is that the research areas related to artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and medical decision making are considerably closer, both conceptually and theoretically, than many of the workshop participants originally thought.

This important new volume presents recent research in healthcare information technology and analytics. Individual chapters look at such issues as the impact of technology failure on electronic prescribing behavior in primary care; attitudes toward electronic health records; a latent growth modeling approach to understanding lifestyle decisions based on patient historical data; designing an integrated surgical care delivery system using axiomatic design and petri net modeling; and failure in a dynamic decision environment, particularly in treating patients with a chronic disease. Other chapters look at such topics as the impact of information technology integration in integrated delivery systems; operations and supply chain control for inventory management in a health system pharmacy; decision-theoretic assistants based on contextual gesture recognition; evaluating emergency response medical information systems; clinical decision support in critical care; virtual worlds in healthcare; and natural language processing for understanding contraceptive use at the VA.

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary science concerned with understanding and utilizing models of cognition. It has spawned a great dealof research on applications such as expert systems and intelligent tutoring systems, and has interacted closely with psychological research. However, it is generally accepted that it is difficult to apply cognitive-scientific models to medical training and practice. This book is based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Italy in 1991, the purpose of which was to examine the impact ofmodels of cognition on medical training and practice and to outline future research programmes relating cognition and education, and in particular to consider the potential impact of cognitive science on medical training and practice. A major discovery presented in the book is that the research areas related to artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and medical decision making are considerably closer, both conceptually and theoretically, than many of the workshop participants originally thought.