This forum is dedicated to personal health in all its many facets: decision-making,
goal setting, celebration, discovery, reflection, coordination—even entertainment.
We’ll look at innovations in interactive technologies and how they help address
current critical healthcare challenges.
Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Editor
Designing Interactive Systems
in Healthcare: A Report on
WISH 2011
Madhu Reddy
Penn State University, Workshop Co-Chair | mreddy@ist.psu.edu
Lena Mamykina
Columbia University, Workshop Co-Chair | lena.mamykina@dbmi.columbia.edu
Andrea Grimes Parker
Georgia Tech, Workshop Co-Organizer | agrimes@cc.gatech.edu
January + February 2012
interactions
Health information technology
(HIT) has the enormous potential
to transform healthcare by positively affecting quality, efficiency,
and cost-effectiveness. However,
despite ongoing efforts by many
government agencies, HIT continues to experience low levels of
adoption [ 1]. Moreover, a growing body of research questions
its impact on medical care [ 2],
for example, by highlighting the
unintended consequences of HIT
[ 3] and medical errors that result
from poorly designed computing
systems [ 4]. Researchers argue
that many of these negative consequences result from a mismatch
between the reality of conducting clinical work and the structure of computing applications
that are meant to support it [ 5].
To address these limitations and
remove the barriers to the success-
ful adoption of HIT, new research
initiatives are focusing on a better
alignment of HIT and clinical prac-
tices, and an approach to system
design informed by best practices in
human factors and human-comput-
er interaction (HCI). However, these
efforts currently exist in several
disjointed research communities,
without established pathways for
transfer of knowledge and exper-
tise. These communities include
but are not limited to biomedical
informatics, HCI, computer sci-
ence, social sciences, and medical
anthropology. Each of these fields
has its own venues for disseminat-
ing research results that rarely
overlap. Therefore, researchers and
practitioners interested in design-
ing patient- and clinician-centric
HIT have little opportunity to
interact and develop a shared body
of knowledge across these com-
munities. As a consequence, there
exists a largely untapped potential
to create deeper and more profound
connections among the biomedical-
informatics, HCI, medical-sociology,
and anthropology communities
that would lead to the development
of new methods, approaches, and
techniques for removing barriers to
the adoption of HIT.
To address this limitation, the American Medical
Informatics Association (AMIA)
and ACM co-sponsored the 2nd
Workshop on Interactive Systems
in Healthcare (WISH), which
was co-located with the AMIA
Annual Fall Symposium on Oct.
22, 2011, in Washington, DC.
The specific goals of WISH 2011
were to:
• develop research agendas for
interactive systems in healthcare
and identify strategies and mecha-
nisms for studying them;
• discuss and develop consensus around existing technical and
methodological challenges in the
design and evaluation of interactive
systems in healthcare;
• establish a new channel for the
dissemination and implementation
of research on interactive systems
in healthcare;
• provide a forum for developing new partnerships between
researchers and stakeholder organizations. Through these partnerships, we hope to build stakehold-
