Reengineering Clinical Workflow in the Digital and AI Era: Toward Safer and More Efficient Care (Cognitive Informatics in Biomedicine and Healthcare)

This timely new edition addresses gaps in the understanding of how health information technology (IT) impacts clinical workflows and how this impact is central to the safe and effective delivery of care to patients. The research in this area has advanced substantially in the past few years since the publication of the first edition, marked by milestone events such as the widespread and matured use of health IT, particularly electronic health records, and a new wave of innovations stimulated by the clinical application of AI-enabled systems such as ambient documentation technologies. This book has been expanded to reflect these new developments in the field and features clearly structured chapters covering a wide range of topics, including aspects of clinical workflows relevant to both practitioners and patients, tools for recording clinical workflow data, and techniques for potentially redesigning health IT-enabled care coordination. Reengineering Clinical Workflow in the Digital and AI Era: Toward Safer and More Efficient Care enables readers to develop a deeper understanding of clinical workflows and how they can potentially be modified to facilitate greater efficiency and safety in care provision, offering a valuable resource for both biomedical and health informatics professionals and trainees.

Kai Zheng, PhD, FACMI is Professor of Informatics and Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He also serves as Director of UCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and the Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program. 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, diffusion and evaluation of health IT, and use of computational methods to augment the value of unstructured free-text health data. Zheng received his PhD degree in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University. He was the recipient of the 2011 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) New Investigator Award that recognizes early informatics contributions and significant scholarly achievements. He was elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) in 2018. From 2019 to 2021, he served as Chair of AMIA’s Clinical Information Systems Working Group.

Johanna Westbrook, PhD, FACMI is Professor of Health Informatics and Patient Safety and Director of the Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Australia; and a Co-director of the Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership Program at Harvard University, USA.  She is internationally recognized for her research evaluating the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) in health care.  This work has led to significant advances in our understanding of how clinical information systems deliver (or fail to deliver) expected benefits. She has published over 600 papers, been awarded > $80M in research grants and is regularly asked to present at international events. Her highly applied research has supported translation of research evidence into policy, practice, and IT system design changes, particularly in areas of medication technology safety and effectiveness.  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) technique and software (available in the Apple Store) to support the conduct of observational workflow studies now used in over 18 countries.

Vimla L. Patel, PhD, DSc, FACMI is a Senior Research Scientist at the Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She has adjunct professorial appointments at Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Trained as a cognitive and educational psychologist at McGill University, Dr. Patel served as a Professor of Medicine and Psychology. She has expertise in using cognitive methods to capture and analyze data to model clinical decision-making and explore ways to augment human intelligence. Her recent research addresses the nature of complexity in the healthcare environment and the use of appropriate methods of investigation for health information technology intervention and patient safety. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences), the American College of Medical Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. An elected founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, she is the past Associate Editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and Assistant Editor of AI in Medicine. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligence-based Medicine and Healthcare. She is an editor or co-editor of eight books and the series editor of the Springer book series in Cognitive Informatics in Biomedicine and Healthcare.