Charlotte Tang

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Michigan–Flint

In this chapter, we highlight the key characteristics of collaborative teams in healthcare and identify a variety of healthcare teams that differ by varying degrees of shared objectives, clarity of role specifications, and interdependencies. We then review sociotechnical design requirements for teamwork in healthcare settings, ending with two case...

Newcomers to a country often face difficulties in adapting to the new healthcare system. Understanding their perceived barriers in utilizing healthcare services in the host country is crucial for designing health IT to meet their health needs. In this paper, we present an interview study of 30 international students attending a U.S. university. We...

Informal caregivers, such as family members and friends, are important for maintaining the health and wellness of the elderly and the chronically ill. However, the complexity of informal caregiving has been under-studied in prior research. In this study, we attempt to answer two main questions – what makes the coordination of patient care so diffic...

International students often bring along medical practices and medications from home when studying abroad, in case they become sick. Upon arrival, international students are faced with many challenges, such as cultural and language barriers, social isolation, financial difficulties, and disparities in healthcare practices. We conducted semi-structu...

Social media has dramatically altered the ways in which people share experiences. Through on-site observations during the Art of Video Games exhibition in a local museum and an examination of related Instagram postings, we found that visitors try to re-experience their memories and to collectively reminisce about their past gaming. We also discuss...

In today’s society, most people are both consumers of information technology and of health care. Virtually every person has consumed health care and will consume more as one ages. Moreover, 84% of US households own a computer,1 and 64% of adults own a smartphone.2 We carry pocket-sized devices that connect us to people around the world and vast sto...

There has been a wealth of research on how individuals manage their tasks in general. However little to none has investigated whether, how, and why personal task management (PTM) behaviors differ across individuals. To fill this gap, we conducted two empirical studies: a focus group + contextual interviews with 19 participants, and an online survey...

We conducted an observational study in an emergency department (ED) to acquire an in-depth understanding of the activities and processes involved in the ED patient outflow and the challenges encountered in the outflow coordination with heterogeneous and autonomous stakeholders within and across organisations. We identified that inefficient patient...

This paper reports how a nurse-managed primary care clinic (NMPCC) prepared for the implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system with limited resources. EHR adoption is a complex task that requires not only implementing a system but also an integration of the system into the existing sociotechnical environments. In this study, we iden...

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are often resource-restricted and rely on volunteers to function. As such, their human infrastructure - the social system supporting work - is different from conventional organizations, and technologies that function in a traditional organization with a stable workforce may not work in NPOs. Through an investigation...

In this chapter, we highlight the key characteristics of collaborative teams in healthcare and identify a variety of healthcare teams that differ by varying degrees of shared objectives, clarity of role specifications, and interdependencies. We then review sociotechnical design requirements for teamwork in healthcare settings, ending with two case...

Introduction: Cognitive Testing on Computer (C-TOC) is a novel computer-based test battery developed to improve both usability and validity in the computerized assessment of cognitive function in older adults. Methods: C-TOC's usability was evaluated concurrently with its iterative development to version 4 in subjects with and without cognitive...

Gillian R. Hayes shares his views on different aspects and functions of health service providers. These aspects include decision-making, goal setting, celebration, discovery, reflection, and coordination. Gillian R. Hayes also looks at innovations in interactive technologies and how they help in addressing prevailing critical healthcare challenges....

Many groupware systems now allow people to converse and casually interact through their computers using multimedia—text, images, video and etc. A visualized history of these interactions can help group members reflect on their past interactions, and can help researchers investigate the nuances of online communities. In this thesis, I address the pr...

Background: Computerized physician handoff tools (CHTs) are designed to allow distributed access and synchronous archiving of patient information via Internet protocols. However, their impact on the quality of physician handoff, patient care, and physician work efficiency have not been extensively analyzed. Methods: We searched MEDLINE, PUBMED,...

With the rapid development of information systems in healthcare practices, the traditional within-clinic, face-to-face mode of patient-provider interactions are increasingly facilitated, enriched, and mediated by new types of health technologies. These technologies are designed to bring better access to patient care information, resources, and a va...

Despite an increasing use of formal healthcare systems such as the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and communication devices, informal communication continues to play an important role in the highly collaborative, dynamic, and information-rich medical work. Formal systems often fail to support the spontaneous and opportunistic needs of healthcare p...

This chapter presents issues that may arise in human-centered research in health care environments. The authors first discuss why human-centered approach is increasingly employed to study and to design health care technology. They then present some practical concerns that may arise when conducting qualitative research in medical settings, from rese...

Mobile computing devices, such as smart phones, offer benefits that may be especially valuable to older adults (age 65+). Yet, older adults have been shown to have difficulty learning to use these devices. In the research presented in this article, we sought to better understand how older adults learn to use mobile devices, their preferences and ba...

A plethora of electronic personal task management (e-PTM) tools have been designed to help individuals manage their tasks. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the extent to which these tools actually help. In addition, previous research has reported that e-PTM tools have low adoption rates. To understand the reasons for such poor adoption and...

Interruptions in the home pose a threat to the validity of self-administered computerised cognitive testing. We report the findings of a laboratory experiment investigating the effects of increased interruption workload demand on older adults' computerised cognitive test performance. Related work has reported interruptions having a range of inhibit...

There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have focused on either clinical settings, such as hospitals and clinics, or non-clinical spaces, like pa...

Many groupware systems now allow people to converse and casually interact through their computers in quite rich ways—through text, images, video, artifact sharing and so on. If these interactions are logged, we can offer these multimedia histories to a person in a manner that makes them easy to review. This is potentially beneficial for group membe...

We conducted an observational study to investigate nurses' communication behaviors in an Emergency Department (ED). Our observations reveal unique collaboration practices exercised by ED staff, which we term as "loosely formed team collaboration." Specifically, ED patient care teams are dynamically and quickly assembled upon patient arrival, wherei...

This chapter presents issues that may arise in human-centered research in health care environments. The authors first discuss why human-centered approach is increasingly employed to study and to design health care technology. They then present some practical concerns that may arise when conducting qualitative research in medical settings, from rese...

This article presents a framework of 6 distinct yet interrelated factors for describing information flow that arose from a combination of field studies in a hospital ward and a review of literature. These studies investigated the dynamics of nurses' information flow, focusing on shift change. The InfoFlow Framework's 6 interrelated factors that aff...

Hospital work coordination and collaboration often requires mobility for acquiring proper information and resources. In turn, the spatial distribution and the mobility of clinicians can curtail the opportunities for effective communications making collaboration difficult. In this situation, a mobile hands-free voice communication system, Vocera, wa...

New technologies for supporting the provision of healthcare are increasingly pervasive. While healthcare computing previously referred to a desktop computer within the consulting room, we are now seeing an ever broader range of software, hardware and settings. This workshop is concerned with how to conduct evaluations which allow assessment of the...

Information technology has changed the way health care is delivered. Electronic health records which are prevalently deployed to replace or supplement paper documentations have made distributed information access at various points of care and work activity achievable with the use of mobile information devices. Our particular concern is with nurse's...

Since health care teams are often distributed across time and location, information sharing is crucial for effective patient care. Studying the use of a mobile information technology in a local hospital ward at two months and eleven months after its deployment identifies both short- and long-term phenomena and reveals a mismatch between the intenti...

This paper reports the findings from two field studies that reveal paper-based artifacts being heavily relied upon in medical shift work despite the deployment of a mobile technology in a local hospital ward. We present the information flow in terms of common and personal information spaces and identify three important functions of these personal a...

We present an observational study that was conducted to guide the design and development of technologies to support information flow during nurses' shift change in a hospital ward. Our goal is to find out how the complex information sharing processes during nurses' brief shift change unfold in a hospital setting. Our study shows the multitude of in...

This paper presents the preliminary stages of an observational study that is intended to guide the design and development of technologies to support information flow during nurses' shift change. There is not sufficient understanding of how the complex information sharing processes take place during the nurses' brief shift change in a hospital setti...

Page 2 This research is concerned with the design and development of technologies to support information flow during shift change which is a relatively unexplored area in Human-Computer Interaction. Shift work involves synchronous, near-synchronous and asynchronous aspects of co-located collaboration. I have chosen the nurses ’ shift change in a lo...

Many groupware systems now allow people to converse and casually interact through their computers in quite rich ways—through text, images, video, artifact sharing and so on. If these interactions are logged, we can offer these multimedia histories to a person in a manner that makes them easy to review. This is potentially beneficial for group membe...

Casual interaction is recognized as the backbone of everyday collaboration, where a wealth of valuable information is exchanged by people in brief and impromptu but context-rich meetings [3]. Within CSCW, many researchers strive to support casual interaction between distance-separated collaborators through specially designed groupware systems. Earl...

This research explores the design and development of technology to support information flow during nurses' shift change. We are conducting an observational study in a hospital ward to acquire an understanding of the processes, practices and mechanisms currently used to support information transfer during shift change and to find out what technologi...

Reflecting on everyday behaviors is an effective method of enhancing them. In today's world, many of these behaviors are mediated by technology. Therefore, making the enhancements resulting from reflection should be supported by the technology through customization. Customizable tools allow users to make changes and appropriate them to their needs....

We present two ongoing studies that are part of a larger multi-disciplinary research project which aims to design, develop, and implement a web-based computerized screening test for cognitive impairment, called Cognitive Testing on a Computer. A laboratory study is conducted to investigate the impact of interruptions on task performance among three...