Cognitive Informatics: Reengineering Clinical Workflow for Safer and More Efficient Care (Health Informatics)

Kai Zheng, PhD, is Associate Professor of Informatics and Associate Adjunct Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. He also directs the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. Prior to joining UC Irvine, he was Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He was Director of University of Michigan’s Health Informatics Program preparing students for careers that will harness the power of information to enhance health and transform individual health and healthcare. Zheng’s research draws upon techniques from the fields of information systems and human–computer interaction to study the use of information, communication, and decision technologies in patient care delivery and management. His recent work has focused on topics such as interaction design,workflow and sociotechnical integration, and diffusion and evaluation of health IT. Zheng received his PhD degree in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of the 2011 American Medical Informatics Association New Investigator Award that recognizes early informatics contributions and significant scholarly achievements. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.


Johanna Westbrook, PhD is Professor of Health Informatics and Director of the Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University. She is internationally recognised for her research evaluating the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) in health care.  Johanna has led important research in the development and application of approaches to evaluate ICT, including new tools and methods which have been adopted internationally.  This work has included the development of the Work Observation Method by Activity Timing (WOMBAT) software to support the conduct of observational workflow studies. 
Johanna is an elected International Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, Fellow of the Australasian College of Health Informatics, and has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. In 2014 she was named Australian ICT professional of the year by the Australian Information Industry Association. In 2016 she was appointed to the Board of the Australian Digital Health Agency. She is Chair of the Deeble Institute Advisory Board, Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, and a member of the Boards of the Sax Institute and the International Medical Informatics Association.

Thomas Kannampallil, PhD is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Associate Chief Research Information Officer at the Institute for Informatics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. His research is at the cross-section of human computer interaction, cognitive models of clinical decision-making, and clinical workflows using quantitative approaches. He was previously at the University of Illinois, the New York Academy of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Thomas has extensively published on topics related to sequential models and analysis in a variety of domains including information search, usability and clinical workflow. He has published extensively in all leading informatics journals and is currently funded by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Institutes of Health. He is also the recipient of American Medical Informatics Association distinguished paper and reviewer awards.

Vimla L. Patel, PhD, DSc is the Director and Senior Research Scientist at Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She is Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University, and has adjunct professorial appointments at Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. She acts as a consultant to IBM. Trained as a cognitive scientist at McGill University, she subsequently served there as a Professor of Medicine and of Psychology. She has expertise in using cognitive methods to capture and analyze data to model clinical decision-making and evaluate human-computer interaction in the context of clinical workflow. Her more recent research addresses the nature of complexity in healthcare environment, and the use of appropriate methods of investigation for health IT intervention and patient safety. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences), the American College of MedicalInformatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. She is an Associate Editor of Journal of Biomedical Informatics and is on the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and Advances in Health Science Education.