Overview
My primary research fields are Medical Informatics, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, and Information Sciences. I am interested in a variety of issues in these areas but most of my current research focuses on three major themes: (1) Collaborative information behavior (2) Temporal features of collaborative work and (3) Collaborative support for teams. I explore these themes utalizing qualitative methods within the healthcare domain primarly in hospital environments. 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.
Research Interests
Collaborative Information BehaviorInformation 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.
Role of Temporality in Collaborative Work and
Technology
Temporality - the experience of time, and the temporal organization
of activities around us - is a central element of our experience of the
world. Phenomena such as the passage of time, the cycle of the seasons,
and the trajectory of aging are so integral to human experience that they
are enmeshed in ancient myths and religious practices. Similarly, just
as temporality is central to our experience of the world, it is also central
to our interactions with each other. Much of our cooperative activity
is built around the temporal organization of the world, from taking turns
at talking to planning large projects; few proposals arrive at the National
Science Foundation without a timeline detailing future plans.
Time, then, is integral to collaboration. However, although it is certainly a topic of interest to researchers from both social and technical perspectives, research into Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has tended to neglect temporality. Recent research by ourselves and by others suggests that a deeper understanding of the temporal aspects of collaborative work holds great promise for developing information tools that more successfully integrate into everyday practice, but that our conceptual and technical approaches to the temporality of collaborative work are relatively under-developed. This project also has the twin goals of expanding our empirical understanding of temporality and the design of interactive systems that better incorporate temporality within the system.
Please some examples of this work here
Collaborative Suppport for Teams
One of the challenges that patient-care teams face 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