Summary
Objectives: To summarize current excellent medical informatics research in the field of human
factors and organizational issues.
Methods: Using PubMed, a total of 3,024 papers were selected from 17 journals. The papers
were evaluated on the basis of their title, keywords, and abstract, using several
exclusion and inclusion criteria. 15 preselected papers were carefully evaluated by
six referees using a standard evaluation grid.
Results: Six best papers were selected exemplifying the central role cognitive and social
sciences can play in medical informatics research. Among other contributions, those
studies: (i) make use of the distributed cognition paradigm to model and understand
clinical care situations; (ii) take into account organizational issues to analyse
the impact of HIT on information exchange and coordination processes; (iii) illustrate
how models and empirical data from cognitive psychology can be used in medical informatics;
and (iv) highlight the need of qualitative studies to analyze the unexpected side
effects of HIT on cognitive and work processes.
Conclusion: The selected papers demonstrate that paradigms, methodologies, models, and results
from cognitive and social sciences can help to bridge the gap between HIT and end
users, and contribute to limit adoption failures that are reported regularly.
Keywords
Medical informatics - International Medical Informatics Association - human factors
- organizational issues - cognitive sciences - social sciences