Madhu C.Reddy, Ph.D.

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Research Interests

My primary research fields are Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Medical Informatics, and Information Sciences. I am interested in a variety of issues in these areas but most of my current research focuses on two major themes: (1) Collaborative information behavior and (2) Collaboration and coordination in healthcare settings. I explore these themes utalizing qualitative methods and prototyping. If you are interested in working with me on any of these areas or want to know more about my research interests, please e-mail me.

 

Collaborative Information Behavior
Information seeking and management activities are a prominent aspect of everyday work. In organizations, information plays a vital role not only in decision-making but also in coordinating activities, contextualizing activities, and providing awareness of others' activities; consequently, organizations are paying more attention to their information seeking and management practices. Within these venues, information behavior is conceptualized from an essentially individual rather than a collaborative perspective; an individual identifies her information need and seeks the information to fill that need. However, individuals rarely work independently in organizational settings. Instead, the dominant setting for information work in these environments is interdisciplinary or multifunctional teams; people normally collaborate with others to accomplish their tasks. These teams play a vital role in an organization's ability to implement its goals; in order to successfully accomplish their activities, teams must be able to efficiently and effectively seek information.

To help team members work together effectively and to design information systems that support their work, we must examine and understand information seeking practices within the collaborative environments of work teams. There are two major goals to this project. First, I would like to expand our understanding of collaborative information behavior practices in a variety of organizational setting using qualitative research methods. Second, I plan to incorporate findings from the fieldwork into the design of novel collaborative information retrieval technologies.

Please see some examples of this work here and here.

I have received an NSF CAREER Award to investigate collaborative information behavior. The award summary is here.

Collaboration and Coordination in Healthcare Settings
One of the challenges that teams face in healthcare is collaborating thorough available information technology. For instance, the electronic patient record (EPR) is currently looked at as the cure for many of the information management problems facing healthcare. However, researchers have long pointed out the numerous challenges to implementing usable and useful patient record systems. I have focused on one of the challenges: how to integrate the diverse activities of patient-care team members. At the center of the medical work is the patient whose health is dependent on the effective coordination among physicians, nurses, pharmacist, and other members of the patient-care team. However, in many ways, each group's work practices are opaque to others. So, the question of how we can design information systems such as the EPR that can support these diverse teams is an important one. It is one that I am trying to address by, first, examining the actual collaborative practices of patient-care teams. I then would like translate the findings into requirements for system design.

Please see some examples of this work here and here

We have received a grant from the NSF to study Collaborative Privacy Practices in busy clinical settings. The award summary is here.

We have also received a grant from The Commonwealth Fund to study IT adoption and coordination amongst rural hospitals.

 

PSU | IST | Contact | Edited December 9, 2011