Titin.net

Follows is my review of an interesting article titled: artifacts and collaborative work in healthcare: methodological, theoretical, and technological implications of the tangible.

There are things when you read, your brain just refuses to let go of them. This article by Dr. Yan Xiao is one of these. Surprisingly, Dr. Xiao was able to squeeze this article in six pages!

This article is a call to reconsider of how IT is implemented in health care. We humans communicate in explicit and implicit methods. We can appreciate if the other person is paying attention or is upset implicitly by looking into their eyes and listening to their voices. IT focuses on explicit communication. And, unfortunately poorly designed systems impede the vital implicit communication. This is obvious in the technique of work-flow abstraction. Data and information flow is plotted with total ignorance to the physical environment. This physical environment includes us humans and the artifacts we use. Humans over years have devised ways to use these artifacts to optimize communication and cognition. The use of books, paper, and white boards are examples. Dr. Xiao gives examples as the white boards used in emergency rooms and operating theaters. He also mentions and example presented by Boguslaw and Porter (1962) present in restaurants’’, the “spindle wheel”.

In medicine, weather in the hospital setting as the examples presented by Dr. Xiao or in a primary care clinic setting, we need to optimize the computer, artifact and human interaction to optimise human cognitive processes and to optimise collaboration among clinicians and with our patients and the public as a whole.

Three areas that Dr. Xiao has shed light on for me that I need to follow on are:

1. Distributed Cognition. :
The term ‘‘distributed cognition’’ is used to describe the nature of problem solving when information processing is distributed in the environment (external representation) and in the problem solver’s head (internal representation). Distributed cognition emphasizes the integral role of external representations and the collaborative nature in human cognition.

2. Display based cognition:
problem solving is often done in the context of an external display.

3. Grounded theory
Is a method to perform qualitative research. It is a theory generative or inductive as apposed to theory conformative or deductive. It follows at lest what I naturally do I think more do. We collect data from qualitative methods and form literature and as we do this we formulate ideas. These ideas mature with more data collection and more reflection. Even those methods that relay on deductive or confirmative methods, need generative or inductive methods to come up with the theory they would like to confirm.
This is nice youtube video on grounded theory.