Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine

As health care is moving toward a team effort with patients as partners, this book provides guidance on the optimized use of health information and supporting technologies, and how people think and make decisions that affect their health and wellbeing. It focuses on investigations of how general public understand health information, assess risky behaviors, make healthcare decisions, and how they use health information technologies.

e-health technologies have opened up new horizons for promoting increased self-reliance in patients. Although information technologies are now in widespread use, there is often a disparity between the scientific and technological knowledge underlying health care practices and the cultural beliefs, mental models, and cognitive representations of illness and disease. Misconceptions based on inaccurate perceptions and mental models, and flawed prior beliefs could lead to miscommunication as well as to erroneous decisions about individuals’ own health or the health of their family members.

Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine: Understanding and Modeling Health Behaviors presents state of the art research in cognitive informatics for assessing the impact of patient behaviour. It is designed to assist all involved at the intersection of the health care institution and the patient and covers contributions from recognized researchers and leaders in the field.

Vimla L Patel, PhD, DSc, FRSC, is the Director and Senior Research Scientist of a new 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 holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and of Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell College of Medicine.  Dr. Patel is an accomplished researcher in the areas of biomedical informatics, cognitive psychology and their application in healthcare settings. She seeks to understand how people learn and evaluate information, whether it's young people, clinicians or the general public, and what factors promote them to act on that learning to make decisions about their health.

Dr. Patel is an associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and sits on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Advances in Health Science Education. From 2007-09, she served as interim chair and vice chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. She was a Professor at Columbia University from 2000-07 and a member of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University from 1982-2000, where she was Professor of Medicine, Director of the Centre for Medical Education, and Director of the Cognitive Science Center. She earned her PhD in Educational and Cognitive Psychology at McGill University in 1981.

Jose F Arocha, MA, PhD, is Associate Professor at the School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo (Canada), and Co-leader of the Consumer Health Informatics Partners (CHIRP), a research group devoted to the study of comprehension of health information on the Internet and the use of technology for wellness and disease prevention. Dr. Arocha's primary research interests include comprehension of health and medical information by lay people and health professional with particular focus on the adult immigrant population. Dr. Arocha is a regular reviewer for the Canadian funding agencies, and for the international health informatics journals. He was trained at McGill University, and received his MA and PhD in Educational Psychology in 1985 and 1991, respectively.

Jessica S Ancker, MPH, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the division of health informatics in the department of healthcare policy and research at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. She conducts research that combines her interests in quantitative methods, cognition, and communication through health information technology. One major research focus is the relationship between information technology design, cognition, and decisions. Dr. Ancker is an associate editor of both Medical Decision Making and BMJ Medical Informatics and Decision Making and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). Dr. Ancker holds a secondary appointment in the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She received her MPH in biostatistics in 2004 and her PhD in biomedical informatics in 2009 from Columbia University.