Research Projects

Collaboration in Safety-Critical Environments

With Austin Henderson, Ben Singer, and Jonathan Wolfman at Pitney Bowes, I focused on communication and collaboration among hospital staff. This work looked at the challenge of allowing distributed workers to collaborate around a medical record without significantly changing clinical practice. Building on a year's worth of ethnographic work in hospitals conducted by Wolfman, I helped design a new piece of technology for supporting a more interactive form of medical coding. I dealt with the social hierarchies in hospitals as well as the challenging issues of safety and data security when introducing a new technology into a clinical environment. As part of this, I designed and implemented a two-week trial in a hospital, during which we introduced the new technology into the Critical Care Unit (CCU), Telemetry, and Health Information Management. For this study, I was responsible for directing the activities of a team of six researchers in the hospital. This involved careful relationship management and the development of new means of data collection. I'm currently in the process of documenting the lessons learned from this research for future publication.

In an early research project, I worked with Paul Camp, Russ Keldorph, Scott Lewis, and Elizabeth Mynatt to examine issues of collaboration faced by firefighters. In emergency situations, firefighters risk their lives unless they can achieve the optimal level of communication. If there is too little radio communication, firefighters remain unaware of the acativities of those around them. With too much radio communication, however, firefighters facing pressing emergencies cannot get through on the radio. In this project (Camp, Hudson, Keldorph, Lewis, & Mynatt, 2000), we looked at developing technical anc social solutions to improve both communication and firefighter safety.

Publications

Camp, P. J., Hudson, J. M., Keldorph, R. B., Lewis, S., & Mynatt, E. D. (2000). Supporting Communication and Collaboration Practices in Safety-Critical Situations. Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing (CHI), 249 - 250. The Hague, The Netherlands.