Name in Lights – a New Textbook
I received a package this week. Inside was the textbook:
Human, Social, and Organizational Aspects of Health Information Systems.
Turning to page 23, as I read the title to Chapter 2, I cannot help but grin. “A Bio-Psycho-Social Review of Usbility Methods and their Applications in Healthcare”
My first book chapter.
Very exciting for me to see – I even had the opportunity to draw my own figures. All in all, it came together fairly well for a first chapter. Writing has never been natural for me (as my dear mother – an English professor – will sigh about), but it did come together.
The key to the chapter is that usability has many forms and can work at many levels. Like medicine, a reductionist view is powerful but not sufficient. We do much better today if we understand the biology of a disease, the personal impact of the illness, and the impact it has on the social network around a patient. For healthcare information systems (e.g. Electronic Health Records), it is the same. First we need to understand the bio (mechanical) aspects of systems – where the computers are, how big buttons are, etc. Next, the design impacts how a user (e.g. RN, MD) makes decisions and need to consider and observe the psychological (cognitive) impacts of design. Finally, medicine is a team sport. At the smallest, the team is the patient:provider pair, and increasingly the team is getting larger including people over time and over distance. Information systems need to support the group work – for improved effectiveness. If we design and test at all three levels, our systems will be more usable and more functional. The chapter is a review of some tools and work at each of the three levels.
So that was my contribution. And the rest book has a great collection of authors. I have had the opportunity to learn and work with several of them over the past several years. I am also honoured that I had a chance to help establish an 18-month primary care informatics fellowship a few years through UBC (thank you Peter!) that supported several BC family doctors learn more about informatics, that grew in collaboration with CIHR’s fellowship to include a primary care stream. Several of the fellows are are contributing authors.
Finally a quick thank you to the editors, Drs. Kushniruk and Borycki for inviting me to contribute a chapter to this book and for not making any snide comments on why “psycho” ended up the title of my chapter.
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