About Us
We are a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of medical decision-making, cognitive foundations of health behaviors and the effective use of computer-based information technologies. Our research is deeply rooted in theories and methods of cognitive science, with a strong focus on the analysis of medical error, development of models of decision-making, and design and evaluation of effective human-computer interactions. These studies are guided by a concern for improving the performance of individuals and teams in the health care system.
Our mission is to conduct basic, translational and applied research in medical decision-making and cognition and develop cognitive support tools for clinicians and patients. Four major focus areas of research are medical errors, distributed cognition, human-centered computing in health information systems, simulation and modeling of teamwork, and social interactions. We take a multilevel approach to the study of medical cognition: from level of brain functions to individual behaviors, up to the level of a team of individuals, then all the way to complex social network dynamics. We take the system perspective, considering the healthcare system as a system distributed across individuals and artifacts, across teams of individuals, and across space and time. We also study cognitive characteristics involved in learning and instruction. Our major domains of research include emergency medicine, intensive care, and preventative medicine through behavior change.
Collaboration between our Center and other institutions include Emory University at Atlanta, Columbia University in NY, Arizona State University in Phoenix, Johns Hopkins University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and TATRC. Local collaborations involve Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, the Gulf Coast Consortia, and the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR), UTH neuroscience program, and the UTH Mental Sciences Institute.
Our research in cognitive informatics applies components of psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience to study individual and team cognition in real world complex environment. Health IT has the potential to improve quality of care, increase patient safety, and reduce cost, but with this comes some great challenges. We strive to address those of the issues and optimize the implementation process of HIT
Research Themes
- Analysis of medical error.
- Distributed cognition and its applications to health care.
- Models of real world collaborative decision-making and teamwork.
- Evaluation of human-computer interactions in the workplace.
- Design of human-centered health information systems.
- Information visualization for clinical decision making
- Neural basis and computational models of medical decision making
- Workflow in healthcare and agent-based modeling
- Analysis of competent performance for health professionals
- Cognitive linguistics and medical decision making
- Distributional Semantics
